‘Dark, Mysterious, and Undocumented’: The Middlebrow Fantasy and the Fantastic

Middlebrow

Simon Thomas

Magdalen College University of Oxford

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Trinity 2013

For Colin, Mum, and Dad

i

Abstract

‘Dark, mysterious, and undocumented’: The Middlebrow Fantasy and the

Fantastic Middlebrow

Simon Thomas, Magdalen College, Oxford University

DPhil Trinity 2013

The concept of ‘middlebrow’ literature in the twentieth century, which received

minimal critical attention from the Leavises onwards, has recently become a site of

literary and sociological interest, especially regarding the interwar period. This thesis

considers the ways in which a corporate middlebrow identity, amongst an intangible

community of like-minded readers, was affected by a popularity of the fantastic in the

1920s and 1930s. This subgenre, which I term the ‘domestic fantastic’ (in which one

or more elements of the fantastic intrude into an otherwise normalised domestic

world) allowed middlebrow authors and readers to focalise and interrogate anxieties

affecting the status of the home and its inhabitants which were otherwise either too

taboo or, conversely, too well-worn for a traditional, non-fantastic examination. This

fantastic vogue was largely initiated by the success of David Garnett’s metamorphosis

novel Lady Into Fox (1922), which prepared the way for the other novels discussed in

this thesis, predominantly Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), Elinor

Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew (1926), Ronald Fraser’s Flower Phantoms

(1926), Edith Olivier’s The Love-Child (1927), John Collier’s His Monkey Wife

(1930) and Green Thoughts (1932), and Frank Baker’s Miss Hargreaves (1940).

Through the lenses of metamorphosis, creation, and witchcraft, these novels respond

to and reformulate contemporary debates concerning sexuality in marriage,

childlessness, and autonomous space for unmarried women. The ‘middlebrow

fantasy’ of the stable, idealised home was being revealed as untenable, and the

fantastic responded. During the interwar years, when assessments of British society

were being widely recalibrated, the domestic fantastic was a subgenre which produced

a select but significant range of novels which (whether playful or poignant, hopeful or

tragic, nostalgic or progressive) provided the means for both author and reader to

interrogate and comment upon the most pervading middle-class social anxieties, in

unusual and revitalising ways.

ii

Contents

Introduction: ‘There may be not one marvel to speak of in a century, and then

[…] comes a plentiful crop of them’………………………………………………...1

Chapter outline…………………………………………………………….....10

Chapter One: Placing the Middlebrow and the Middlebrow Place…………......19

‘The British, with their tidy minds / Divide themselves up into kinds’: between

the brows…………………………………………………………………......22

“I am not an Intellectual and don’t wish to be thought one”………………...27

‘This literary allusion not a success’: playing with the classics……….….....35

The places and communities of middlebrow reading………………….….....45

‘Good service for the ordinary intelligent reader’: the role of the Book

Society……………………………………………………………………......51

The fantasy of the ideal home……………………………………………......59

The home in flux…………………………………………………………......64

Servants and the geography of the home…………………………………….70

Chapter Two: ‘Adventures of the everyday are much the most interesting’:

Finding Room for the Domestic Fantastic………………………………………...78

Minding Ps & Qs: commonsense, etiquette, and inheriting the Gothic….......81

‘The duration of this uncertainty’: questioning the fantastic…………….......89

‘Slipping from waking into sleep’: turning points……………………….......93

The complicit reader and the style(s) of the fantastic………………………100

‘The Oedipus complex was a household word, the incest motive a

commonplace of tea-time chat’: the middlebrow Freud and the fantastic

language of psychoanalysis…………………………………………...…….110

Chapter Three: ‘My Vixen’: Marriage and Metamorphosis…………………...119

‘Hold her husband and share his ecstasy’: marriage and sexual

knowledge………………………………………………………………......124

Woman-as-animal…………………........…........…...........….…..................133

Woman-as-plant…………………………………………………………….142

Non-fantastic versions of metamorphosis………………………………......146

Observer and observed……………………………………………………...153

Metamorphosis of the domestic…………..…..…………………………….163

Chapter Four: “Creative Thought Creates”: Childlessness and Creation

Narratives…………………………………………………………………………..167

Frankenstein: the modern creation novel…………………………………...169

‘A rather muddled magic’: (lack of) method in the domestic fantastic…….172

Blurring the line between creator and created……………………………...176

The creative power of desire and the difficulty of identity………………...182

Adoption, agency, and non-fantastic creation……………………………....190

“I hate her and I love her and – I’m half afraid of her”: power struggles......198

Miss Hargreaves, madness, and the God complex………………...….........207

iii

Chapter Five : ‘She can touch nothing without delicately transforming it’ :

Re-creating Self in Lolly Willowes………………….……………………………..215

‘A sort of extra wheel’: Laura and the Willowes’ home…………………....216

‘One of these floating aunts’………………………………………………..224

‘A Constant Flux’: the quasi-metamorphosis of Laura Willowes…………..235

'The bugaboo surmises of the public’: subverting stereotypes of the witch...238

‘You are too lifelike to be natural’: Laura’s Satan………………………….248

‘She smiled at the thought of having the house all to herself’: Laura’s

independent space……………………………………………………….......254

Conclusion: “Is this really a part of the house, or are we dreaming?”: Fantastic

Novels as Alternative Spaces………………………………...................................270

Why the fantastic?..........................................................................................274

The fantastic as investigation……….....……………………………………283

After the Second World War………………………………………...….......287

1

Introduction

‘There may be not one marvel to speak of in a century, and then […]

comes a plentiful crop of them’1

There is no longer any need to apologise for studying middlebrow literature. Since

Nicola Beauman’s pioneering 1983 survey A Very Great Profession: the Woman’s

Novel 1914-39 (which sought to ‘correct [an] imbalance and to present a portrait

through their fiction of English middle-class women during the period between two

world wars’2), the middlebrow has become steadily more ‘respectable’ as an object of

investigation. While Beauman conceded that she was not primarily writing literary

criticism, instead choosing ‘to write about these novels because I loved them’,3 her

successors have been more objective and analytical. Nicola Humble’s invaluable

study The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s, with its ‘central aim […] to

rehabilitate both the term and the body of literature to which [it refers]’,4 tells of the

middlebrow ‘remain[ing] firmly out in the cold’5 in academia; Alison Light’s Forever

England (1991) writes similarly that studies of literary culture as a whole

(incorporating the middlebrow as an important aspect) are still ‘felt as heretical by

twentieth-century critics’.6 Thankfully this is broadly diminishing – in no small part

because of these works by Humble and Light – and (though to speak of cultural

legitimacy seems at odds with a middlebrow sensibility) exploration of this literature

1 David Garnett, Lady into Fox (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922 repr.1928) p.1

2 Nicola Beauman, A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-39 (London: Persephone

Books, 1983 repr.2008) p.3 3 Ibid. p.343, p.335

4 Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2001 repr.2007) p.1 5 Ibid. p.1

6 Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London:

Routledge, 1991) p.ix

2

has been given an academic legitimacy.7 Yet there has been little recognition of a

significant trend in the interwar years, particularly in the 1920s, for fantastic

middlebrow novels (I follow many writers in middlebrow studies by concentrating on

its most prolific and characteristic era, the interwar years.)8 By identifying and

exploring this popularity for the fantastic, greater light can be shed upon the ways in

which middlebrow writers interrogated contemporary societal anxieties (particularly

those to do with marriage and singleness, as shall be seen), as well as expanding an

understanding of the early twentieth-century middlebrow novel as a complex and

multifaceted entity.

Writers about the middlebrow have tended towards the broad or the specific. Works

like Beauman’s and Humble’s consider the middlebrow as a whole, albeit divided into

valuable subsections devoted to particular concerns and aspects of identity.9 Others

who have addressed the area have tended towards examining specific authors or

topics. Alison Light thus shapes an argument based on the ‘idea of a conservative

embracing of modernity’10

– what she terms ‘conservative modernism’ – by

examining the oeuvres of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, Jan Struther, and

Daphne du Maurier. Fifteen years later, Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei read

7 Janet Galligani Casey even argues that study of the middlebrow ‘has largely enabled the very concept

of hierarchy in the literary realm’. [Janet Galligani Casey, 'Middlebrow Reading and Undergraduate

Teaching: The Place of the Middlebrow in the Academy' in Erica Brown and Mary Grover (eds.)

Middlebrow Literary Cultures: the Battle of the Brows, 1920-1960 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan,

2012) 25-36, p.28] 8 As Alison Light writes, ‘“Between the wars” is a convenient and workable fiction’ [Light, Forever

England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars p.18]; I have not incorporated

precise years into my title because exact parameters for the domestic fantastic are impossible to draw,

and wartime dates (though helpful as an approximate) are not flexible enough: the vogue arguably

started in 1922, with Lady Into Fox, but while Frank Baker’s Miss Hargreaves is (since published in

1940) technically a wartime book, the war is never mentioned and it more closely allies with a

peacetime sensibility. 9 Beauman divides A Very Great Profession into chapters discussing war, surplus women, feminism,

domesticity, sex, psychoanalysis, romance, and love, while Humble’s The Feminine Middlebrow Novel

has chapters on readers and reading, class, home, family, and gender. 10

Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars p.11

3

‘domestic modernism’ (‘how the meaning of home and the narration of domestic

space were articulated in the impressive upsurge of women novelists in Britain

between the two world wars’11

) primarily through the novels of E.H. Young, and most

recently Erica Brown has considered comedy in the middlebrow novel through a

discussion of Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth von Arnim.12

In turn, Rosa Maria

Bracco (although she has also written a short monograph on the middlebrow as a

whole13

) chose to frame her study Merchants of Hope through responses to the First

World War, while others have focused on the middlebrow predominantly as an

extension of, or antagonism to, modernism.14

Any selective investigation must run

the risk of attempting to extrapolate to a generality that which is only true locally.

This risk remains, of course, present in this thesis, but by considering the middlebrow

through a genre lens, I intend to reveal and examine one important facet of the

middlebrow which has been hitherto sidelined, rather than embarking upon a

comprehensive definitional exercise.

Writing on the fantastic has, perhaps understandably, been rather more theoretical

than that on the middlebrow. Tzvetan Todorov is widely regarded as a pioneer in

fantasy theory, and his 1970 work (translated into English in 1975) The Fantastic: a

Structural Approach to a Literary Genre was the first treatment of the fantastic to

move away from the inventories of fantastic ‘ingredients’ favoured by writers such as

11

Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E.H. Young

(Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006) p.1 12

Erica Brown, Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel: Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth

Taylor (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012) 13

Rosa Maria Bracco, Betwixt and Between: Middlebrow Fiction and English Society in the Twenties

and Thirties (Melbourne, Victoria: University of Melbourne, 1990) 14

Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919-

1939 (Providence, RI; Oxford: Berg, 1993); Stella Deen, Challenging Modernism: New Readings in

Literature and Culture 1914-45 (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002); Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton,

Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel 1900-1930 (Hampshire: Macmillan, 2000)

4

Propp and Penzoldt.15

I shall expand upon various approaches to the fantastic in my

second chapter, but theorists (notably W.R. Irwin, Eric Rabkin, T.E. Apter, Neil

Cornwell, and Kathryn Hume16

) have chiefly developed or responded to Todorov’s

theory with the aim of establishing an overarching theory of the fantastic, independent

of period or ‘brow’. Even when fantastic theory has been investigated through a

specific framework (as the Marxist theorist Rosemary Jackson does17

) there is rarely a

sense of compartmentalising subsections of the fantastic, or analysing one branch of

its manifestation in actual novels (this is largely because Todorov and other fantasy

theorists write as structuralists.) In essence: there has thus far been no middlebrow

study which has explored the fantastic at any length, and no critic of the fantastic who

has specifically considered the middlebrow.18

While practical uses of ‘middlebrow’ and ‘fantastic’ will be explored throughout this

thesis, they are both slippery terms which have often been employed in disparate ways

by different writers. Although the word ‘middlebrow’ has been the subject of

considerable debate, the shifting nature of its application tends to be ideological rather

definitional. That is, the fundamental differences in use concern value statements,

rather than understanding of the terminology. ‘Highbrow’, ‘middlebrow’, and

15

Vladimir Propp, Svatava Pirkova-Jakobson, and Laurence Scott, Morphology of the Folktale (1928)

(Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1958); Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (London:

Peter Nevill, 1952). Although from different critical standpoints, there is striking similarity between the

approaches of these theorists, both of whom tackle fantastic novels with a logic that dismisses nuances

and extradiegetic factors. 16

W.R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Urbana, Chicago, London:

University of Illinois Press, 1976); Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1976); T.E. Apter, Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Neil Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to

Postmodernism (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990); Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis:

Responses to Reality in Western Literature (New York: Methuen, 1984) 17

She concludes: ‘Structurally and semantically, the [modern] fantastic aims at dissolution of an order

experienced as oppressive and insufficient.’ [Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion

(London: Methuen, 1981) p.180] 18

The closest is the handful of pages devoted to middlebrow authors, including Edith Olivier and

Rachel Ferguson, in Glen Cavaliero, The Supernatural and English Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1995) pp.86-89

5

‘lowbrow’ have straightforward physiognomic associations (‘high-browed’, denoting

a ‘lofty forehead’ dates to 184819

), but by the early twentieth century were much more

common as descriptions of cultural predilections. ‘Highbrow’ developed from an

adjective (dating to 1884) into a noun by 1908, while the noun ‘lowbrow’ was already

in use in 1901.20

‘Middlebrow’ did not follow immediately, and in 1940 Robert

Graves and Alan Hodge still prefer the term ‘mezzo-brow’,21

but the earliest use of

‘middlebrow’ as a noun is dated to 1924 (and, as an adjective, to 1928).22

The label is

not, then, solely a retrospective classification (in the way that modernism is) but it had

a multiplicity of applications, which will be addressed in chapter one.

As an (intentionally loose) initial definition for the adjective, which is developed at

length in my first chapter, ‘middlebrow’ can be considered to apply to the variety of

novel most commonly read by members of the middle-class. An investigation into the

class-consciousness of the middlebrow novel, or the varying class distinctions of the

middlebrow reader, would doubtless be fruitful (and has, indeed, been performed in

The Feminine Middlebrow Novel23

) but I have found it simplest, and close enough to

truth for practical purposes, to assume this correlation. I do not, however, consider

the middlebrow solely a feminine endeavour. Of the authors I consider, several are

men, and fruitful work has been done on the masculine middlebrow in a recent

19

"high-browed, adj." http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/86864 OED Online, Oxford University Press.

(accessed September 18, 2013). 20

"lowbrow, n. and adj. (and adv.)" http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/110661; "highbrow | high-brow,

n. and adj.". http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/86863 OED Online, Oxford University Press. (accessed

September 18, 2013). It should be noted that the entry for ‘lowbrow’ has been updated for the OED’s

third edition, while ‘highbrow’ has not. 21

Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-end: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939

(London: Faber & Faber, 1940) p.52 22

"middlebrow, n. and adj.". OED Online. Oxford University Press

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/252048 (accessed September 18, 2013) 23

Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s pp.57-107

6

collection of essays on that topic edited by Kate Macdonald.24

Having said that, many

of the concerns used to organise my chapters (sexuality, childlessness, spinsterhood)

are predominantly feminine ones, and while interwar middlebrow literature is not an

exclusively female domain, there is a definite leaning in that direction.25

Turning to the fantastic, terminology is used with even greater elasticity (as well as

being necessarily belated, since the field of fantasy theory was essentially non-

existent before the second half of the twentieth century.) The malleability of the

words ‘fantastic’ and ‘fantasy’ in different theorists’ hands has led to what Kathryn

Hume describes as an ‘inchoate imprecision of wordlessness’,26

and Walter Scott’s

1827 article on the topic, one of the earliest pieces of critical writing to name and

address the fantastic, refers to its ‘dark and undefinable nature’27

– not dissimilar to

the title of this thesis. (I, like Scott – and like Woolf, from whom the quotation is

taken28

– intend the word ‘dark’ to allude to the nebulous and obscured nature of the

fantastic, rather than the horrific or macabre.) Paradoxically, the freedom and

removal of barriers which inspire many fantastic novels is antithetical to theory,

which demands precision and categorical barriers (even if these are muddied by

introducing reception and perception). Theorists have simply failed to agree on the

placement of dividing lines.

24

Kate Macdonald, The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880-1950: What Mr. Miniver Read (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 25

It should be noted that the feminine is not, of course, necessarily feminist. Many of these novels are

neither regressive nor progressive (as regards a feminist agenda) but simply reflective. 26

Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature p.3 27

Walter Scott, 'On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and Particularly on the Works of

Ernest Theodore William Hoffman' Foreign Quarterly Review, 1/1 (1827) 60-98, p.62 28

Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928 repr.2008) p.63

7

I believe the most useful understanding of the terminology is to consider a Fantasy29

novel one set in a world different from the reader’s own, subject to different and

distinct natural (or perhaps unnatural) laws, whereas a fantastic novel is one which

incorporates one or more elements of the fantastic within a recognisable world,

subject to the same natural laws as the reader’s (or, at least, this is the premise as the

novel begins) – ‘almost in our time, happening in Oxfordshire amongst our

neighbours’30

being the example framed in Garnett’s Lady into Fox. Thus the

fantastic exists in constant and contingent interconnection with the real, and in turn

comments back upon the real; flights of imagination remain firmly tethered to the

ground. To quote Amaryll Chanady:

In the former, nothing surprises the characters, since magic is the norm, while in

the latter, the protagonist is surprised and often terrified by a situation that his

culture has taught him to reject as impossible.[…] [T]he second example

belongs to the fantastic, since the world view coincides with our own, and is

threatened by an event which does not fit into the logical code expressed by the

rest of the text.31

This thesis is concerned only with fantastic novels, rather than Fantasy novels, since

the former were read far more widely among interwar middlebrow readers, and offer

more valuable reflections back upon that audience – since the ‘actual’ is never

abandoned. The debate regarding whether the fantastic ought to be considered a

mode, a genre, or an impulse is one which is only limitedly useful, and almost entirely

irresolvable.32

These divisions tread uncertain critical territory and terminology, with

29

Following Eric Rabkin’s lead, I will use a capitalised ‘F’ for Fantasy, to distinguish it from other

uses of the word, such as ‘fantasy theorists’ – a term I will use as the easiest way in which to group

those with disparate definitional bases. [Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature p.29] 30

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.2 31

Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved

Antinomy (New York: Garland, 1985) pp.2f. Chanady is comparing the ‘marvellous’ and the fantastic;

her ‘marvellous’ here incorporates Fantasy and magic realism. 32

Merely sampling three critics: Todorov incorporates the word ‘genre’ into the title of his work,

Jackson labels the fantastic a mode, between the marvellous and mimetic, and Cornwell borrows

8

porous boundaries between them – few of which would have occurred to middlebrow

readers and writers, and none of which are very illuminative about why and how the

middlebrow used the fantastic. Simply for ease of discussion, ‘subgenre’ shall be

used to designate the middlebrow or domestic fantastic, as a compromise between

various terms.

If the definition of ‘fantastic’ were extended to more abstract applications as an

impulse or hysteria (Kathryn Hume, for instance, argues that all literature is composed

of both mimetic and fantastic impulses33

), examples could be found in an enormous

range of middlebrow novels, from the surreal conversations in E.M. Delafield’s Diary

of a Provincial Lady to the heightened dialogue of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, to

every misunderstood contretemps which permeates the writings of Wodehouse and

Saki. By drawing a tighter net around the definition of the fantastic, and thus the

body of novels studied, the investigation is not only more manageable but more

revealing, as those authors who used more stringent genre structures were also more

obviously making a choice to occupy a separate diegetic space, still within the reach

of the domestic novel.

It need hardly be added, after the work done by the various writers about the interwar

middlebrow mentioned above, that the period saw a significant rise in the number of

middlebrow domestic novels, and it would be superfluous to attempt to replace the

list, created by Briganti and Mezei, of ‘converging factors [which] contributed to the

proliferation of the interwar domestic novel’:

Jakobson’s term to call the fantastic the ‘dominant’. [Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion

p.32; Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism p.145] 33

Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature p.xii

9

the post-war reification of the home, domestic values and Englishness; the

campaign of ‘homes fit for heroes’; the mass production, advertising and

consumption of domestic goods; the increase in women’s magazines; and the

implementation of government policies like the marriage bar, National

Insurance Acts and dole office practices that removed women from the

workplace in spite of their immense contribution to the war effort.34

As such, in combining an examination of the domestic novel and the fantastic novel, I

have coined the (fairly logical) term ‘domestic fantastic’ to apply to the novels I

consider. The fantastic incident(s) need not take place within the confines of the

home in these narratives – indeed, as shall be seen, places contiguous to, or imitative

of, the home are often the most fruitful sites of the fantastic – but domestic space is

challenged or changed as a direct result of the fantastic in all the examples I consider.

Todorov suggests that there is ‘a curious coincidence between the authors who

cultivate the supernatural and those who, within their works, are especially concerned

with the development of the action, or to put it another way, who seek above all to tell

stories.’35

Although middlebrow writing is not unable to adapt highbrow literary

approaches, the primary importance of ‘stories’ is one of the reasons why the

middlebrow is particularly fertile ground for the fantastic.36

While the fantastic often

works its way backwards to affect the style of a novel, it must be predominantly

evident scenically (‘narratological rather than verbal’,37

as Gillian Beer writes of Lolly

Willowes) – that is, through plot, character, and the set pieces of a novel. The

middlebrow novel is perfectly suited to this approach where more avant-garde

34

Briganti and Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E.H. Young p.2 35

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cornell Paperbacks;

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975) pp.162f 36

The middlebrow novelist E.F. Benson, for example, laments that ‘anything like a plot or story is

crowded out’ of E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and argues that ‘the art of fiction [is] practically

equivalent to the art of story-telling, whether the story in question is the physical story of a soul or one

of more material adventure’. [E.F. Benson, 'Two Types of Modern Fiction' London Mercury, February

(1928) 418-427, p.426] 37

Gillian Beer, 'Sylvia Townsend Warner: "The Centrifugal Kick"' in Maroula Joannou (ed.) Women

Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) 76-

86, p.78

10

narratives, with a focus upon ‘fluidity, fragmentation, [and] indeterminacy’,38

would

not be.

With uncertain and contested definitions from two directions, the domestic fantastic

finds itself in dual critical wildernesses, on the peripheries of two spheres, but it is in

this overlap that unconventional and interesting narratives can be found, as well as a

demonstration that middlebrow authors did not, contrary to Bracco’s suggestion,

refuse ‘to deviate from comfortably familiar presentations.’39

The familiar and

unfamiliar are, instead, allowed to confront one another, in a dialogue which re-forms

the everyday lived experience of the reader.

Chapter outline

The following chapter outline will also introduce the principle novels under

consideration and, where necessary, provide justification for the inclusion of certain

authors within the range of this thesis. In many instances, writing about the

middlebrow has been intended to rehabilitate or aggrandise novels perceived to be

unduly neglected, or (to quote Hilary Radner) ‘legitimate certain women writers as

artists by establishing them within the literary canon’.40

(For instance, Briganti and

Mezei state that ‘[r]ather than dooming Young’s texts, along with many other

domestic novels, to be shelved under ‘culturally significant’ writing, we claim a

38

Rita Felski, 'Modernism and Modernity: Engendering Literary History' Rereading Modernism: New

Directions in Feminist Criticism, (1994) 191–208, p.196 39

Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919-1939 p.10 40

Hilary Radner, 'Extra-Curricular Activities: Women Writers and the Readerly Text' in Mary Lynn

Broe and Angela Ingram (eds.) Women's Writing in Exile (London & Chapel Hill, NC: University of

North Carolina Press, 1989) 251–267, p.252

11

literary status for them’.41

) Revisionists often follow the process laid out by John

Guillory:

In the case of devalued or forgotten works, revaluation typically appeals to the

“real” value or quality of the work; nothing other than a strong assertion of such

value is likely to succeed in the actual institutional circumstances of canonical

revision.42

In this manner, a number of middlebrow novels have been ‘rescued’ since the 1980s,

with reprint publishers such as Virago and Nicola Beauman’s own Persephone Books

seeking to instate, in the same way as Briganti and Mezei for E.H. Young, a

corrective measure against a book’s exclusion from the canon: as Beauman stated in

one of the early Persephone Quarterly newsletters, ‘We are going to find it quite

tricky thinking up openings for these pieces that do not always begin, “it is a mystery

why this book has been forgotten”.’43

My thesis may seem to work in the opposite direction. Not only do I resist evaluative

assessments and attempts to add to a canon (or even to what Jane Marcus calls ‘the

highly-privileged “non-canonical”’44

), I pull certain authors and novels away from

their current standing as ‘legitimate culture’ and back into the hinterland of the

middlebrow. From the works I have chosen, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly

Willowes and (to a lesser extent) David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox have both been

subject to attempted inclusion in an expanded definition of modernism.45

As Humble

41

Briganti and Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E.H. Young p.12 42

John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago; London:

University of Chicago Press, 1993) p.26 43

Nicola Beauman, 'Persephone Quarterly 2', (London: Persephone Books, 1999) p.4 44

Jane Marcus, 'Bluebeard's Daughters: Pretexts for Pre-Texts' in Alice A. Parker and Elizabeth A.

Meese (eds.) Feminist Critical Negotiations (Phildelphia: John Betjamins Publishing Company, 1992)

19-32, p.26. Her examples include Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Kate

Chopin’s The Awakening. 45

Gay Wachman discusses the place for Lolly Willowes in the ‘mainstream, modernist canon’, while

Jane Garrity argues that it should not suffer ‘exclusion from studies of literary modernism’ – although

12

writes of modernism, ‘[w]e can negotiate its definition endlessly, but it brings us no

closer to seeing the literary map of the time as contemporaries would have seen it.’46

It is this ‘literary map’ that I privilege when choosing which novels to incorporate in

my study, and (as I will argue below) Lolly Willowes and Lady Into Fox belong with

the other middlebrow texts in my schema, since that is the way they were perceived

by their initial public, or by sizeable portions of it. This is also one of the reasons that

I have considered only novels, rather than plays, poetry, or short stories; novels were

the primary reading choice of the middlebrow public. (Q.D. Leavis was

condemnatory when she wrote that ‘for most people “a book” means a novel’,47

but it

is a practicable assumption.) The other reason this thesis concerns novels alone is

because it is the narrative form most suited to a sustained and clear use of the

fantastic.

In dividing my chapters, I have considered first (in chapter one) the non-fantastic

middlebrow, to ground exploration of the domestic fantastic in an understanding of its

broader audience. This discussion is indebted to Humble and Beauman for various

debates and topics used as lenses for the establishment of both the middlebrow

identity and contemporary interpretations of this identity. I explore how middlebrow

literature was classified, received, and understood both by its intended readership and

by critics including the Leavises, Woolfs, and Desmond MacCarthy (the ‘middlebrow

fantasy’, in this context, is a series of misreadings perpetuated by these writers) and

others like Wendy Mulford have championed instead its ‘supremely-crafted traditional art’. [Gay

Wachman, Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties (London; New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers University Press, 2001) p.3; Jane Garrity, Step-daughters of England: British Women

Modernists and the National Imaginary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) p.148;

Wendy Mulford, This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland: Life, Letters

and Politics 1930-1951 (London: Pandora, 1988) p.16] 46

Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s p.25 47

Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Pimlico, 1932 repr.2000) p.6

13

the fundamental importance of the home in discovering, procuring, reading, and

discussing this literature. In delineating the middlebrow ethos, and especially the role

of place in reception and distribution of literature, this chapter uses Delafield’s

Provincial Lady novels (1930-1940) and the Book Society (founded in 1929) as

representative voices of the middlebrow, and I privilege mimetic writing as one of the

cornerstones of the middlebrow novel. The other ‘middlebrow fantasy’ is the image

of the home as stable and passive: this chapter introduces potentially disrupting

influences in the middlebrow home (particularly the evolving role of servants) which

prepare space for the introduction of the domestic fantastic.

My second chapter looks broadly at the domestic fantastic as a subgenre, relating it to

Todorov and other fantasy theorists, but (more importantly) considering the ways in

which the middlebrow novel must compromise and make allowances to permit the

fantastic, battling against fundamental facets of its identity, particularly a

prioritisation of commonsense and etiquette. I explore the structures of domestic

fantastic novels, particularly the pivotal moments at which the fantastic enters a

narrative, and how this is affected by paratextual and extradiegetic factors. These

influences build up a portrait of the tacitly complicit middlebrow reader, whose

participation in the dynamics of credulity and suspended incredulity shows them not

to be passive dupes but acquiescent in the sustainment of the fantastic. Finally,

stylistic approaches are considered: domestic fantastic novels tend towards either a

dispassionate (faux)biographical approach or a more ornate, often symbolic, style.

The latter of these is considered in relation to the language of Freudianism, a theory

which (as will be shown) was selectively well-known to middlebrow readers and,

though often laughingly dismissed, the source of potential domestic instability.

14

The final three chapters are divided into manifestations of the fantastic, in a manner

not dissimilar to Farah Mendlesohn’s (‘these categories are determined by the means

by which the fantastic enters the narrated world’48

) but, rather than her structurally

vast categories (portal-quest, immersive, intrusive, and liminal) I have chosen the

specific manifestations of metamorphosis, creation, and witchcraft (which I read as an

intermediate between metamorphosis and creation). I make no pretence that this is an

exhaustive list of the ways in which the fantastic can appear in a narrative; for

instance, Jorge Borges’ supposedly-exhaustive list (‘the basic devices of all fantastic

literature are only four in number: the work within the work, the contamination of

reality by dream, the voyage in time and the double’49

) contains none of my

classifications, and I none of his. Rather, those I have chosen are those most

commonly found within domestic fantastic novels (particularly the most influential

examples) and those most clearly related to specific middlebrow concerns, as detailed

below.

To divide the forms of the fantastic at all may appear reductive or in danger of short-

circuiting theory and returning to the cataloguing endeavours of Propp or Penzoldt.

Their techniques, however, should not be thrown out with the bathwater, despite the

work of Todorov and those after him. Rather, a division of fantastic narratives based

on internal elements must also take extradiegetic catalysts or effects into account. By

lending weight to both internal and external factors – that is, the forms and structures

of fantastic novels alongside their readers and those readers’ implied and actual

48

Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008) p.xiv 49

Jorge Luis Borges, Donald A. Yates, and James East Irby, Labyrinths; Selected Stories and Other

Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) p.18

15

responses – it is possible to arrive at a more nuanced portrait of the interrelation

between society and the fantastic.

I read metamorphosis, in my third chapter, in relation to changing dynamics of female

sexuality in marriage – the idea of woman-as-animal – primarily using David

Garnett’s Lady Into Fox (1922). This novel (depicting Silvia Tebrick’s

metamorphosis into a fox) was possibly the first, and certainly the most influential,

fantastic novel of the 1920s – and affirmably (if not solely) middlebrow. Garnett was

aware of the nuances of cultural placement, and keen to resist his father’s idea that

Lady Into Fox be ‘issued as a jeu d’esprit for the intellectual public’.50

Although D.H.

Lawrence did indeed condemn the novel as a ‘childish jeu d’esprit for the grown-up

nursery’, Garnett was applauded by highbrow critics including Leonard Woolf and

Desmond MacCarthy – but Lady Into Fox was also ‘immediately read and talked

about by the fashionable world’, so much a part of popular consciousness that by

1924 it could inspire the fashion slogan ‘Leopard Into Lady’.51

Although a highbrow

success, then, it was also widely regarded as an exemplar of the middlebrow; even

MacCarthy’s description of it as ‘a perfect literary nick-nack’52

situates it as a

domestic ornament, adding to the décor of literature rather than a supporting wall.

Other metamorphosis novels (including two tales of metamorphosis into plants,

Ronald Fraser’s Flower Phantoms [1926] and John Collier’s Green Thoughts [1932])

and non-fantastic narratives about marriage to animals (particularly Collier’s 1930 His

Monkey Wife) contribute to a picture of metamorphosis narratives playing with

50

David Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest (London: Chatto & Windus, 1955) p.246 51

D.H. Lawrence and H.T. Moore, Collected Letters, 2 vols. (2; London: Heinemann, 1962) p.800;

Leonard Woolf, 'Mr. Garnett's Second' The Nation & The Athenaeum, 26/04/24 (1924) p.115;

Desmond MacCarthy, Criticism (London: Putnam, 1932) pp.223-9; Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest

p.248; ‘The Leopard and the Lady’, Birmingham Post (02/12/24), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/29

(Press Cuttings vol.27a, 1924), University of Reading 52

MacCarthy, Criticism p.225

16

fantastic extrapolations of metaphor and simile to engage with the contemporary

Stopesian debates and changing opinions about a middle-class woman’s sexual role in

marriage. The fantastic permits discussion of that which, while no longer taboo, was

still culturally uncertain and sensitive; it is an opening up of the scope of the

permissible.

My fourth chapter turns attention to the question of spinsterhood and childlessness in

the 1920s; the often-cited two million ‘surplus women’. I compare Edith Olivier’s

1927 novel The Love-Child (about a lonely spinster who accidentally conjures her

imaginary childhood friend into life) and Elinor Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew,

published a year earlier (and concerning an eighteenth-century priest, Peter Innocent,

commissioning a nephew, Virginio, to be created from glass) with the quintessential

modern creation narrative, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). By contrasting

characters’ methods and motivations for creation, I show how Frankenstein’s

connection between creativity and knowledge is replaced by that between creativity

and artistry, spontaneity, and questions of selfhood and identity. Desire for scientific

knowledge is replaced by desire for (a form of) parenthood, thus more closely

corresponding with the perceived social ill of childlessness. By 1940, when Frank

Baker’s Miss Hargreaves was published, attention had turned away from ‘those

endless old maids of the country that are now so constantly the butt of novelists and

short story writers’,53

as described by a commentator in 1926, and Baker’s novel

shows how the creation narrative shifted in the period to a broader examination of

power, life, and the afterlife.

53

C.H.W., 'Review of Lolly Willowes' The Bookman, March (1926) 326-327, p.327

17

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel about witchcraft, Lolly Willowes (the focus of

my fifth chapter), responds to another aspect of the status of unmarried women in the

1920s; a lack of autonomous space. Although, as discussed, Lolly Willowes has been

the subject of attempted canonisation, it was received as determinedly middlebrow

(though not, as Warner ruefully noted, a bestseller54

) when it was published.

Described as ‘one of the “smart” things to read this season’,55

Lolly Willowes was also

the first (albeit unpopular56

) choice of the new Book-of-the-Month Club in America.

I resist the dominant reading of the novel as a triumphant ‘escape from imperialist

patriarchy’,57

and instead use the text to explore how quasi-metamorphosis and the

(re)creation of self work in tandem with the spinster’s search for selective (rather than

total) freedom.

Finally, I consider how peripheral placement is articulated spatially throughout

domestic fantastic fiction, and how the subgenre more broadly relates to reality, as a

way of observing and commenting upon the readers’ lives and concerns. As W.R.

Irwin writes, when ‘the amazing is kept in plausible contact with the normal, the

literary result will be fantasy of lowered intensity but greater speculative interest.’58

Intensity (as immersion in a different sphere) is a form of separation resisted by the

fantastic, which permits speculation into the narrative world and back towards the

reader, by signposting their reasons for engaging with the text. In trying to identify

54

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Val Warner, and Michael Schmidt, 'Sylvia Townsend Warner in

Conversation' PN Review, 8/3 (1981) 35-37, p.36 55

‘The Modern Witch’, Newcastle Daily Journal & North Star (26/06/26), Chatto & Windus Archive

CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of Reading 56

Janice Radway notes that the partners were ‘swamped […] with returned copies.’ [Janice A. Radway,

A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel

Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) p.195] 57

Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt, 'Footsteps of Red Ink: Body and Landscape in Lolly Willowes' Twentieth

Century Literature, 49/4 (2003) 449-471, p.449 58

W.R. Irwin, 'The Metamorphoses of David Garnett' PMLA: Publication of the Modern Language

Association, 73/4 (1958) 386-392, p.392

18

any overarching motivation for writing and reading the domestic fantastic, I conclude

that it forms narratives which are neither unduly optimistic nor pessimistic, but

primarily investigative – allowing the reader to be both observer and observed,

experiencer of and commentator upon the ‘actual’ – offering a new, unusual, and

valuable vantage upon (and resetting of) the everyday experience of the middlebrow

public.

19

Chapter One

Placing the Middlebrow and the Middlebrow Place

One of Rose Macaulay’s characters defines a middlebrow novel as ‘not exactly

stupid, and not quite tosh […] [b]ut no intellectual background’.59

Similarly, a review

of Richmal Crompton’s Journeying Wave (1938) labels the novel ‘pleasant – neither

more nor less. If it were less, it would be gossip; if it were more, it would be

genius’.60

The wide scope between gossip and genius – between ‘stupid’ and

‘intellectual’ – indicates the critical and receptive wilderness for this variety of novel

in the interwar period. In the same year that Crompton’s novel was published, a very

similar spectrum is suggested for the house belonging to Edith Olivier (author of The

Love-Child):

It might be a keeper’s cottage if it were a little less elegant; and if it were not

quite so sober and workaday, it could easily be one more of those small

pavilions of pleasure which were dotted about the park during the eighteenth

century.61

Homes and narratives are treated with the same appraising eye. The house and the

novel are assessed for the space they provide, how inhabitable they are, and for what

they reflect back upon the person living with (or in) them. Through both fiction and

life outside the text, a sense of, and the determining of, physical and cultural place is

fraught in the interwar period for middlebrow readers. There is a tussle between a

celebration of the domestic – not only as a home but as a paradigm for the

middlebrow’s ideology, reception, and reading process – and the unravelling fantasy

of the archetypal stable home.

59

Rose Macaulay, Keeping Up Appearances (London: Methuen, 1928 repr.1986) p.163 60

Anthony Bertram, 'New Novels' Times Literary Supplement, 02/07/38 (1938) p.447 61

Edith Olivier, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley: Personal Memories (London: Faber & Faber, 1938)

p.244

20

The middlebrow’s mediocrity (in the true sense of the word) encourages reception

which peers over boundaries, into categories either side. Q.D. Leavis’ consequent

accusation that ‘the middlebrow is anxious to get the best of both worlds’62

employs

the belittling vocabulary of social nervousness. Woolf, meanwhile, dismisses

intermediacy as inherently self-defeating: middlebrows are, she writes, ‘neither one

thing nor the other. […] Their brows are betwixt and between’.63

Ultimately the

reading (or misreading) of middlebrow novels depends upon the codes and structures

by which they are understood.

For many readers, this engagement with codification was self-reflexive; mimesis

forms the chief point of identification not only with the characters and situation of a

middlebrow novel but (by extension) with the unknown, broad community of

middlebrow readers and writers (as will be discussed).64

It is difficult to single out a

disproportionately significant middlebrow novel – a facet of middlebrow’s difference

from (and resistance to) highbrow literature is the absence of a delineated Great

Tradition; every middlebrow novel is, in effect, the middlebrow novel. Bearing this

in mind, it is still useful to choose an example as a continuing thread. E.M.

62

Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public p.197 63

Virginia Woolf, 'Middlebrow (1942)' in Leonard Woolf (ed.) Collected Essays: Volume Two

(London: Chatto & Windus, 1972a) 196-203, p.198. In this essay/letter, Woolf suggests similarities

between highbrow and lowbrow, also discussed by John Collier in an unpublished review of his own

fantastic novel His Monkey Wife: ‘This is a strange book. It clearly sets out to combine the qualities of

the thriller with those of what might be called the decorative novel. Like most things which are

extremely far apart, these two are also surprisingly near to one another.’ Collier appears to define his

middlebrow work as the overlapping of disparate attempts (‘sets out’ is hardly the same as

‘accomplishes’) rather than its own entity. [John Collier, His Monkey Wife: or, Married to a Chimp

(London: Robin Clark, 1930 repr.1994) p.xv] 64

Northrop Frye’s influential definitions of mimesis would ascribe that favoured by middlebrow

authors ‘low mimesis’ since ‘the hero is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity’.

The adjective ‘low’ is useful in comparison to ‘high mimesis’ (for characters whose ‘authority,

passions, and powers of expression [are] far greater than ours’) but loses value outside of this binary. I,

thus, use ‘mimesis’ with the same definition Frye attributes to ‘low mimesis’. [Northrop Frye, Anatomy

of Critisim: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957) p.34]

21

Delafield’s popular Provincial Lady novels, published between 1930 and 1940 in four

instalments, are intentionally a representative voice for the interwar middle-class,

middlebrow woman (the Provincial Lady is described by Time and Tide as ‘a

complete and therefore composite portrait of, not only one woman, but a type of

woman, a state of society, a phase of life’65

) – and, since they are not fantastic, can act

as the ‘control group’ of middlebrow literature. Delafield describes the first

instalment as ‘a casual chronicle of the everyday life of an everyday group’66

and

reports receiving many letters, ‘almost all of [which] said in effect the same thing:

This is an exact transcription of my own life.’67

Her self-effacing, ironic diaries take

experience of the domestic world as both their catalyst and their principal subject –

and it is the language and structure of the home that form the outlines of her

perceptions of reality, as well as the language for ‘decoding’ literature. Lest it appear

that the novels present an unduly saccharine concept of the home, it should be noted

that Delafield also describes her inspiration as ‘the many disconcerting facets

presented by everyday life to the average woman.’68

Throughout her contribution to

Titles to Fame (from which the above quotations are taken) Delafield iterates the term

‘disconcerting’, in relation to the diaries’ topic, creation, and reception alike. Rather

than asserting the stability of the home, Delafield hints towards its more disturbing

and uneasy aspects; those aspects that distort a neat codification of the readership and

the middlebrow prototype.

65

Anon., 'Review of Diary of a Provincial Lady' Time and Tide, 20/12/30 (1930a) 1609-1610, p.1609.

This article purports not to be a review, since that would ‘seem almost too personal, for week by week

the Diary has appeared in these columns’. 66

E.M. Delafield, 'The Diary of a Provincial Lady' in Denys Kilham Roberts (ed.) Titles to Fame

(London: Thomas Nelson & Son 1937b) 121-138, p.123 67

Ibid. p.131 68

Ibid. p.125

22

‘The British, with their tidy minds / Divide themselves up into kinds’69

:

between the brows

Novels which use the fantastic invite their own (often competing) structures for

analysis, as will be addressed in the next chapter – from Tzvetan Todorov’s

structuralism to Rosemary Jackson’s Marxism – but the choice of evaluative practices

is no less crucial for middlebrow literature as a whole. Much of the discussion and

antagonism regarding middlebrow literature in the interwar period can be attributed to

misreadings; that is, choosing an inappropriate code by which to interpret.

Middlebrow writers and readers, as shall be seen, privilege the home as the site of

literary activity and use the language of the domestic to discuss and understand

literature. This refusal to acknowledge a chasm between literary and other activities

is one of the sources of angst for those interwar critics seeking to rationalise the

cultural placement of the middlebrow – led by the Leavises and their attempts

variously to understand, dismiss, and ridicule. Q.D. Leavis’ influential study Fiction

and the Reading Public professes to ‘take account of the fiction that does not happen

to be, or to have become, literature.’70

In this sentence, she ostensibly appears to

embrace the possible differences between inherent and interpreted literary value. She

ultimately refuses, however, to recognise any estimable semantic code beyond the

literary, and evolves her own fantasy of the middlebrow.

To begin with, Leavis dismisses the role of the intellect, and suggests that ‘the reading

habit is now often a form of the drug habit’,71

degrading the reading of the novels in

question to an instinctive or habitual urge. Habits are intrinsic to the experience of the

69

Pont and E.M. Delafield, The British Character Studied and Revealed (London: Collins, 1938) p.18 70

Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public p.xxxiv 71

Ibid. p.7

23

everyday, yet Leavis’ chosen collocation precludes an affirmative reading of the

commonplace. The reader has (in her model) abdicated any autonomy, and is at the

mercy of their ‘fix’. Similarly, she writes that ‘this body of writing has exerted an

enormous influence upon the minds and lives of English people’72

By suggesting that

the ‘body of writing’ is active in the reading relationship, rather than the ‘English

people’, Leavis disempowers the non-highbrow reader, and her use of ‘body’ in close

proximity to ‘minds and lives’, and the words ‘exerted an influence’, promotes a

somatic phraseology debased and separate from the intellectual, as though

middlebrow novels had an inevitably negative effect on the body as a form of

intoxicant or disease.

Leavis is not alone in suggesting the vocabulary of drug addiction; this image is

acknowledged by the middlebrow community, often in a humorous manner (tacitly

recognising the limitations of this interpretive model), but in Leonora Eyle’s guide for

spinsters, Unmarried But Happy, she writes:

The employment of leisure is another thing that may bring dangers. Cinema-

going and novel-reading are excellent pastimes, but they can easily become

something of a drug. Some films, of course, like some novels, inspire and

stretch the mind, but to get into the habit of seeing a film – any film – several

times a week or of borrowing a light “escape” novel from the library almost

every day can become a sort of drug.73

Again, it is the quality of the work in question which leads Eyles to suggest a narcotic

comparison, but it is significant that the activities she warns against involve an

engagement with entertainment outside the home – going either to the cinema or the

library. Although the library’s ‘escape novel’ presumably returns with the reader to

72

Ibid. p.xxxiii 73

Leonora Eyles, Unmarried But Happy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1947) p.81

24

the home, this breach of the domestic exacerbates the denial of reality which is a

symptom of drug abuse.

For drugs, of course, are often a route to resisting reality and causing the everyday to

be transformed (and oneself to be transformed with it, however temporarily).

Fantastic novels are susceptible to comparison with hallucinogenic drugs, however

much they seem to cling to the reality surrounding the fantastic occurrence. It is an

image made concrete in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where her perspective

changes through growing and shrinking after eating the food she discovers. The idea

of the fantastic being brought about by eating is teasingly mentioned in Elinor

Wylie’s 1926 novel The Venetian Glass Nephew:

This impression was the more amazing, in that Angelo Querini believed in

neither apparitions nor fables save as the results of an imperfect digestion and

an inferior intellect.74

The humour with which Wylie satirises the attribution of intellectual interpretations to

bodily causes is reflected in the way middlebrow colloquialisms use the metaphors of

reading as somatic or addictive: ‘can’t put it down’ and ‘immersed in this book’, for

instance. A review of The Provincial Lady Goes Further speaks correspondingly of

reading in ‘100-page doses’.75

Idiomatically however, these expressions playfully

comment upon the inseparability of the literary and prosaic, rather than Leavis’

intention: to separate middlebrow reading from highbrow reading, and do so through

somatic images debasing the middlebrow beyond civilised activity. It is a metaphor

which can be used humorously and knowingly (by many middlebrow writers),

74

Elinor Wylie, The Venetian Glass Nephew (London: William Heinemann, 1926) pp.81f 75

Francis Iles, 'New Fiction' Time and Tide, 12/11/32 (1932) 1253-1254, p.1253

25

anxiously (as with Eyles) or, with Leavis, as the basis for a misreading of middlebrow

codes.

Ironically, in an essay critiquing Dorothy L Sayers as prototypical of ‘the educated

popular novelist’, Leavis uses a corporeal (rather than critical) term for her own

response, describing the writing as ‘nauseating’, adding that novelists of this variety

are ‘really subjects for other kinds of specialists than the literary critics.’76

Lurking

behind this phrase are the silent collocations ‘medical specialist’ or even

‘psychoanalyst’ – given the rising belief caused by Freudianism that hallucinogenics

(as indicative of an inability to control the mind and its projections) were not the

exception but the rule.77

In describing herself as nauseated, Leavis reveals her own neurosis. As Humble notes

in The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, Leavis ‘demonstrates a palpable fear of fiction

run wild, proliferating beyond control’.78

This proliferation threatens highbrow critics

on two levels: novels may ‘usurp’ the techniques of literature, or may simply be

produced at too fast a rate, to too wide an audience – clashing with the highbrow

celebration of the minority.79

Indeed, as Steven Fischer notes, the lowering costs of

book production in the twentieth century meant that, rather than the reserve of the

76

Q.D. Leavis, 'The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers' Scrutiny, VI (1937) 334-340, p.334 77

See Virginia Woolf, Reviewing (Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets; London: Hogarth Press, 1939) p.20

for the somewhat satirical point that ‘with some differences the medical custom might be imitated –

there are many resemblances between doctor and reviewer, between patient and author.’ 78

Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s p.18 79

F.R. Leavis’ choice of the name ‘Minority Press’ indicates this pride in the quality, and he assumes

as unquestionable truth that ‘only a few are capable of unprompted, first-hand judgment’ [F.R. Leavis,

Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Minority Pamphlets; Cambridge: The Minority Press, 1930)

p.4.] Similarly, Eliot suggests that ‘it is an essential condition of the preservation of the quality of the

culture of the minority, that it should continue to be a minority culture.’ [T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the

Definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1948) p.107] J.B. Priestley is loudest amongst those

who object to the fact that ‘the very term “popular novelist” is beginning to look like an insult.’ [J.B.

Priestley, 'Some Reflections of a Popular Novelist' London Mercury, XXVII/158 (1932) 135-142,

p.141]

26

minority, ‘the book had become a mass commodity’.80

This rapid increase in novel-

publication, and widespread literacy81

– John Carey states that ‘[t]he difference

between the nineteenth-century mob and the twentieth-century mass is literacy’82

–

challenged the supremacy of the minority, and preclude careful ascription or

taxonomic control over the literary marketplace.

Secondly, there is also a sense (for Leavis) that this ‘proliferation’ was a disorder

which would infect the home: that reading women, and especially reading servants,

will undermine the efficiency of the household with their addiction, fed by this

uncontrolled procreation. The intellectual’s role becomes one of implementing

judicious birth control; a loaded image in the wake of works such as Marie Stopes’

Married Love (1918). Just as pregnant maids are discharged as issues of awkward

household anxiety in many novels of the period,83

so Leavis suggests the

overproduction of literature threatens the stability of the home.

Without an appropriate literary language to describe or ascribe middlebrow works,

definitions often depend upon what the middlebrow is not. Even within Delafield’s

novel, a character (self-reflexively) seeking a similar work can give only a formula of

anti-criteria:

80

Steven Fischer, A History of Reading (London: Reaktion Books, 2003) p.295. He gives the example

that, in Germany, ‘raw materials had accounted for 30 per cent of a book’s price in 1870, but only 12

per cent in 1912.’ 81

Ninety per cent of the population in England in 1900 were literate. [Ibid. p.297] 82

John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia

1880-1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992) p.5. Fischer calls literacy in the twentieth century the

‘union card to humanity’. [Fischer, A History of Reading p.301] 83

See, for example, Rachel Ferguson, Alas, Poor Lady (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), Dorothy

Whipple, The Priory (New York: Macmillan, 1939)

27

Not a detective novel, not a novel about politics, nor about the unemployed,

nothing to do with sex, and above all not a novel about life under Nazi régime

in Germany.84

Given these strictures, it is difficult to pinpoint the middlebrow. The Oxford English

Dictionary’s first recorded use of ‘middlebrow’ as a noun, from 1924, is: ‘Ireland's

musical destiny, in spite of what the highbrows or middlebrows may say, is intimately

bound up with the festivals.’ A year later, in Punch, the illustration is more satirical:

The BBC claim to have discovered a new type, the “middlebrow”. It consists of

people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought

to like.85

Presumably these instances are superseded by colloquial or spoken use since both

examples anticipate readerly knowledge of the term (and its implications). Early use

of ‘middlebrow’ thus sets the tone for its connotations; Punch in particular (though

themselves labelled middlebrow by Leavis)86

bases its pejorative definition upon that

which the middlebrow is not. This definition suggests that middlebrow reception of

literature takes place on dual planes: the actual reading process, and the aspirational

reading process, as though the reader were readying themselves for a stride into the

highbrow. The middlebrow reader is depicted as peeping into the highbrow category

in the manner of a social inferior eavesdropping at a party.

“I am not an Intellectual and don’t wish to be thought one”87

This interpretation is fundamental to the most prevalent interwar misreading of

middlebrow writers: that they are simply the ‘stale, second-hand, hollow’ counterparts

84

E.M. Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in Wartime' The Provincial Lady (London: Macmillan, 1940

repr.1947) 371-529, p.434 85

"middlebrow, n. and adj.". OED Online. June 2013, Oxford University Press.

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/252048 (accessed September 21, 2013) 86

Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public p.76 87

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in Wartime' pp.477f

28

of their highbrow cousins, with ‘an appearance of literariness’ easily seen through by

those with any aptitude. 88

Indeed, Leavis adds that ‘these [writers] are to some extent

undoubtedly conscious of what they are doing (and so are able to practise more

adroitly on their readers)’.89

‘Practise […] on’, an image redolent of both doctor and

deceiver, implies that readers (and lesser writers) are incognisant and helpless –

relating to T.S. Eliot’s later statement that ‘we should not consider the upper levels as

possessing more culture that the lower, but as representing a more conscious

culture’.90

Leavis thus presents readers of these texts as victims preyed upon by

devious writers; passively, almost involuntarily, reading the books provided. Central

to Leavis’ misreading of middlebrow intention is the concept of awareness, with her

assumption that divergence from her primary model of literature must be caused by

deliberate deception or oblivious naivety.

Leavis’ rhetoric echoes Gustav Le Bon’s influential 1895 work The Crowd, in its

portrayal of the semi-conscious mass. Le Bon depicts crowds as ‘extremely

suggestible, impulsive, irrational, exaggeratedly emotional, inconstant, irritable and

capable of thinking only in images – in short, just like women.’91

Association in the

period between the middlebrow and the feminine92

further enabled highbrow critics to

88

Leavis, 'The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers' pp.142f. Similarly, Desmond MacCarthy suggests in

‘Popular Writers’ that ‘Popular taste […] likes barefaced imitations of the qualities it understands as

much as those qualities themselves.’ [Desmond MacCarthy, Experience (London: Putnam, 1935)

p.283]. He implies that the act of repetition is itself comforting, and middle- and lowbrow readers

thrive on recognition, in contrast to Ezra Pound’s famous mantra of the period ‘make it new’. 89

Leavis, 'The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers' p.141 90

Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture p.48 91

Carey’s paraphrase: Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the

Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 p.27 92

Much could be written on the topic of this association but, as an example, Orwell writes in

‘Bookshop Memories’ (1936) that ‘what one might call the average novel – the ordinary, good-bad,

Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel – seems to exist only for women’.

[George Orwell, Narrative Essays, ed. George Packer (London: Harvill Secker, 2009b) p.41] As

mentioned in my introduction, I believe there is an association between the middlebrow and feminine,

but not an exclusive one.

29

dismiss the middlebrow as the voice of crowd hysteria93

– propounding a them/us

dichotomy without permitting an equivalent responding voice from ‘them’, and thus

transmuting the middlebrow voice into an unreasoning mob. The anonymous mob is,

indeed, the frivolous and malevolent model of gossip writ large. Although

middlebrow readership does embrace a wider, intangible community, it does not (of

course) follow that they are unreasoning or de-individualised. Indeed, the same

argument is levelled in the other direction, with highbrow and middlebrow

commentators using identical images of ‘the sheep-like crowd who follow the dictates

of highbrow literary critics’ (or whichever ‘brow’ they are believed to be unthinkingly

following) to discredit each other.94

Many highbrows of the period pre-empt Bourdieu’s tenet that middlebrow/middle-

class literature is ‘a culture of pastiche’, always in a reverential relationship with

‘legitimate culture’.95

In the (later) view of Dwight Macdonald, ‘[t]he special threat

of Midcult [his equivalent of ‘middlebrow’] is that it exploits the discoveries of the

avant-garde.’96

‘Exploitation’, however, need not mean imitation: instead,

middlebrow writers could adopt and adapt ‘avant-garde’ techniques, with or without

experiments with the fantastic. It is curious that a Macmillan’s Reader’s Report could

write of Delafield’s Nothing Is Safe, which deals with the psychological aftermath of

93

As noted in the title chosen by Clare Hanson, Hysterical Fictions: The "Woman's Novel" in the

Twentieth Century (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) 94

George Birmingham, Book Guild Bulletin (July 1930), cited in Leavis, Fiction and the Reading

Public p.25; c.f. also p.194; J.B. Priestley, 'High, Low, Broad' The Saturday Review, 20/02/26 (1926)

222-223, p.222. Cuddy-Keane notes how Woolf mocks this image in ‘Middlebrow’ – “The hungry

sheep – did I remember to say that this part of the story takes place in the country?” – and goes on to

explore imaginatively the various possible levels of Woolf’s sheep metaphor. [Melba Cuddy-Keane,

Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

p.27] 95

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984) p.327. Carey offers an interestingly divergent view, that

‘[t]hough it usually purports to be progressive, the avant-garde is […] always reactionary’ since it

defines itself in its difference from, and ‘its ability to outrage and puzzle the mass’. (Carey, The

Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 p.18) 96

Dwight Macdonald, 'Masscult and Midcult II' Partisan Review, 27/Fall (1960) 589-631, p.605

30

a divorce upon two children: ‘She cannot, of course, shift our point of view suddenly

from the consciousness of Julia to objective narration, or skip suddenly into the head

of Terry’;97

generally techniques such as free indirect discourse, unusual focalisation,

internal monologue, and stream-of-consciousness were sufficiently widespread to be

accepted by the middlebrow, and used without directly duplicating. It is perhaps

disingenuous of Rosa Maria Bracco to suggest that middlebrow authors intended their

work to ‘keep the canon of nineteenth-century fiction, as it understood it, alive and

functioning by safeguarding it against modernism.’98

Indeed middlebrow writers, rather than being either oblivious to or unquestioningly

echoing experimental forms of writing (the alternatives asserted by highbrow critics)

could react with balanced criticism. Novelist E.F. Benson writes in 1928 that stream-

of-consciousness is ‘nothing more than skimming off the scum that is continually

rising to the surface of the brain’; Priestley suggests it is the ‘sloppiest of all

methods’, and Rose Macaulay’s parody of the technique in Crewe Train elicits the

response: ‘“I suppose,” said Denham doubtfully, “Jane did think like that. I suppose

she was a little queer in the head.”’99

When middlebrow writers do use these

techniques, they can be misread as failed imitations by their refusal to forfeit the

commonsense and self-effacement essential to their middlebrow voice, demonstrated

here by Denham’s tone of rationality (even though she herself is often left outside the

brow schema, bewildered by each strata).

97

Macmillan’s Reader’s Report (20/05/36) on Nothing Is Safe by E.M. Delafield. (British Library,

Society of Authors archive, Add.MSS.54927) 98

Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919-1939 p.12 99

Benson, 'Two Types of Modern Fiction' p.424; Priestley, 'Some Reflections of a Popular Novelist'

p.139; Rose Macaulay, Crewe Train (London: Methuen, 1926 repr.1985) pp.122f. In another of

Macaulay’s novels, Keeping Up Appearances, it is ironically the servant (‘morning woman’) who

speaks in a stream-of-consciousness style, described thus: ‘still the stream flowed, until, like the

weariest river, it ran somewhere safe to sea.’ [Macaulay, Keeping Up Appearances p.59]

31

Even when fanciful or fantastic, this middlebrow voice insists upon a Denham-like

practicality and domestic rationality: it must exist harmoniously within everyday

experience. Literary activity is not permitted to supersede the domestic – an attitude

to which Delafield alludes frequently, especially after the protagonist herself becomes

a published author: ‘Aunt Mary hopes that my writing does not interfere with home

life and its many duties, and I hope so too’.100

Delafield emphasises the middlebrow’s

lack of undue veneration for ‘Literature’ in the Provincial Lady novels, particularly

the final volume wherein an iterated theme is that wartime conditions will ensure

people are ‘almost forced to take to books’.101

Pretention is anathema to the middlebrow (the fact that the Provincial Lady is

‘unpretentious’ is singled out as her most characteristic attribute by the critic Henry

Seidel Canby102

) and, while Delafield writes flippantly, there is a recognition that

reading is an activity on the same level as going to the cinema or for a drive; taking up

time in the day, rather than an atemporal, purely intellectual exercise. Priestley refers

to ‘the ultra-ultras’103

in a 1931 Book Society News as shorthand for the ultra-

highbrow, an expression used frequently in this publication to separate unsympathetic

highbrows from the sympathetic middlebrow. Storm Jameson uses ‘ultra’ with the

same disparagement in her description of occasions when modernist techniques fail:

The flames, the burning intense phrases, might have leapt – and reduced the

characters to ashes. Which is precisely what happens in those ultra-modern

100

E.M. Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady Goes Further' The Provincial Lady (London: Macmillan, 1932

repr.1947) 123-260, p.227 101

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in Wartime' p.523 102

Quoted in Rachel R. Mather, The Heirs of Jane Austen: Twentieth-Century Writers of the Comedy of

Manners (New York: P. Lang, 1996)p.44 103

J.B. Priestley, 'Brute Cult' Book Society News, October (1931) 8-9, p.9

32

novels written in sharp jerky sentences, splendidly destitute of verbs. And

reminiscent of nothing so much as of a fat woman with palpitations.104

Her own language is intentionally (one presumes) heightened, written with ironically

unorthodox syntax and conflicting imagery – brought to earth with a feminised, but

deliberately grotesque, image. In a similar vein, Walpole writes in 1937 that the

‘novel in general now has become so coldly sophisticated that we, as readers, are

constantly made to feel that we are fortunate indeed to have met anybody as

intelligent and well educated as the author.’105

In the same article, he suggests that

‘intelligence’ and ‘creative imagination’ are antagonistic forces, and the sense

pervades the Book Society’s publications that overtly-demonstrated intellect was

inelegant and poor form, even if possessing this intelligence was positive. Writing

about Rebecca West’s The Thinking Reed in a 1936 Book Society News, Julian Huxley

states that ‘there is very much besides intellection here’.106

Huxley demonstrates the

uneasy status of cleverness in middlebrow reception by substituting the unusual word

‘intellection’ (which sounds as though one were sampling intellect) for ‘intellect’ or

‘intelligence’, and by apologising for any hint of its presence.

A middlebrow intellectual inferiority complex is thus transformed into a superiority

complex, whereby openly flaunted intellect is a social faux-pas rather than a merit, as

shown by Delafield:

Pamela lavishly announces that I am very, very clever and literary – with

customary result of sending all the very young gentlemen into the furthermost

corner of the room, from whence they occasionally look over their shoulders at

me with expressions of acute horror.107

104

Storm Jameson, The Georgian Novel and Mr. Robinson (London: William Heinemann, 1929) p.35 105

Hugh Walpole, 'Review of And So - Victoria' Book Society News, May (1937) p.5 106

Julian Huxley, 'Review of The Thinking Reed' Book Society News, April (1936) p.7 107

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady Goes Further' pp.222f

33

Social anxiety about ‘cleverness’ is here dramatised into spatial isolation – even while

bringing the readership on side with the implication that the Provincial Lady does not

consider herself to be ‘very, very clever’ (the duplicated modifier acting in the same

way as ‘ultra ultra’108

), nor feels any regret that she is not – yet because of the label

she is banished to a corner. Throughout the Provincial Lady diaries, Delafield

attaches heightened semantic significance to terms including ‘literary’ and

‘distinguished’ as labels which provoke horror in the protagonist – ‘literature’ and

‘literary’ are divorced spheres in the Provincial Lady’s vocabulary, the latter as an

anti-domestic (and thus unsympathetic) term:

Conversation runs on personal and domestic lines, and proves thoroughly

congenial, after recent long spell of social and literary exertions.109

The dichotomy of ‘congenial’ and ‘domestic’ against ‘literary exertions’ (which is

given the language of a strenuous physical regime) is a clear indication of the

middlebrow ethos, where mimicry of the ‘literary’ is far from a sought-after label.

G.M. Young’s image of a cohesive literary organism, from 1937, is a more useful

paradigm than that of imitation:

A true, a sound, a social culture must be middlebrow, the highbrow elements

serving as exploratory antennae, to discover and capture new ideas for the

middlebrow mass to assimilate.110

This view, though sympathetic, is still too reductive in its idea of middlebrow

‘assimilation’; a term which does not sufficiently allow middlebrow mediation to

these ‘new ideas’. Young’s critical language – ‘true’; ‘sound’; ‘social’ – offers only

108

Elsewhere in the diaries, examples include ‘Very, very distinguished Novelist’; and ‘Conversation

very, very literary and academic’. [E.M. Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' The Provincial Lady

(London: Macmillan, 1930 repr.1947) 1-121, p.26; p.99] 109

E.M. Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in America' The Provincial Lady (London: Macmillan, 1934

repr.1947) 262-370, p.343 110

Cited in Bracco, Betwixt and Between: Middlebrow Fiction and English Society in the Twenties and

Thirties p.46

34

vague, abstract epithets for a middlebrow culture, with malleable interpretations and

no literary connotation. The terminology resonates with a moral register, rather than a

scholarly one. More fundamentally, in depicting the middlebrow as purely derivative

(something which persists even in Nicola Humble’s sympathetic study of the

middlebrow, where she terms it ‘an essentially parasitical form’111

), he does not

recognise the significance of the middlebrow emerging mise-en-scène from within,

and for, a domestic milieu.

While Young writes with an objective voice (if not an entirely objective theory), most

contemporary commentators nailed their colours to the mast by way of collective

pronouns. Each writer on the topic assumes an acquiescent audience and a shared

community of likeminded ‘brows’. In an essay titled ‘Broadbrow’, Priestley lists his

criteria, and writes that if the reader can tick them off, ‘you are a Broadbrow. In short,

you are the salt of the earth, and, of course, one of us.’112

Similarly, Woolf’s

‘Middlebrow’ includes ‘We highbrows read what we like and do what we like and

praise what we like.’113

In both cases, the use of ‘us’ and ‘we’ reasserts a collective

response and collective identity. Priestley’s evolution from ‘you’ to ‘us’ represents a

process of inclusion, or welcoming into the fold, but when claiming that highbrowism

is something innate, with no verifiable means of assessment, MacCarthy makes an

unusual choice of pronoun:

You cannot even, alas, be certain of qualifying as a highbrow by hard work, by

reading the best books, looking at the best pictures, hearing the best music. You

may get an entrance on those terms, but you will be found out when you are

there.114

111

Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s p.11 112

Priestley, 'High, Low, Broad' p.223 113

Woolf, 'Middlebrow (1942)' p.199 114

MacCarthy, Experience p.310

35

Rather than ‘we’ or ‘they’, MacCarthy addresses those outside the highbrow

community, and the ambiguity of ‘you’ – that is, whether it is plural or singular – puts

those addressed in an uneasy isolation. His image of ‘an entrance’, accompanied by

the spatially specific ‘when you are there’, conjures the idea of a venue, and an

experiential place to be visited or occupied – if one is permitted beyond its cordoned-

off parameters. A very similar spatial image is used in Forster’s Howards End,

focalised through the intellectual outcast Leonard Bast:

They had all passed up that narrow rich staircase at Wickham Place, to some

ample room, whither he would never follow them, not if he read for ten hours a

day. Oh, it was no good, this continual aspiration. Some are born cultured; the

rest had better go in for whatever comes easy.115

Again, a physical locale (here elevated as though it were celestial) is equated with

intellectual success, which cannot be accessed by studiousness alone. There is even

the hint of Bast’s ill-fated literary leanings in the free indirect discourse (signalled by

the sigh ‘Oh’): ‘some are born cultured’ has an echo of the letter Malvolio reads in

Twelfth Night; that ‘some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have

greatness thrust upon them.’

‘This literary allusion not a success’:116

playing with the classics

Mention of Shakespeare highlights a paradox in middlebrow treatment of a

stratification of writers. Despite a refusal to elevate a select few contemporary

writers, a literary heritage remains significant in a formation of the middlebrow voice.

Although Leonard Woolf claims that ‘in the majority of cases before a great work of

art is accepted generally as such, it is accepted by a few highbrows and rejected by the

115

E.M. Forster, Howards End (London: Penguin Books, 1910 repr.2000) p.67 116

Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.14

36

general public’,117

this process was true, if at all, for only a specific period of past

literature – no latent mass popularity has come to fruition for, say, Ulysses. Both

middlebrows and highbrows of the interwar period claim ‘ownership’ of the classic

novels as their inherited legacy, and consider themselves the continuation of this

heritage. While recent adherents of middlebrow literature have sought to widen the

canon, or promote anti-canonicity (borrowing Stanley Fish’s argument of ‘interpretive

communities’, that ‘there are no fixed texts, but only interpretive strategies making

them’118

), interwar middlebrow writers rarely challenge the idea of an extant (past)

canon. Even Hugh Walpole, when advocating literary egalitarianism in the Book

Society News, does not deny the existence of ‘Masters’:

I don’t know what the first class is. There are no classes in literature. There are

about half a dozen Masters, and then the writers whom we prefer.119

These ‘Masters’, for the middlebrow reader, are represented most significantly by

Dickens, the Brontës, and Shakespeare, all of whom are frequently alluded to in the

Provincial Lady novels. The extent of literary allusion within the diaries is such that a

spoof (by Delafield herself, in her regular column ‘The Sincerest Form…’) appearing

in Time and Tide a week after the final column of the first book, suggests that the

‘Provincial (but not necessarily a Lady)’ reads her children The Anatomy of

Melancholy.120

Throughout the series, allusions are generated by everyday actions

provoking the Provincial Lady’s memory, rather than direct acts of reading. As

Humble notes, these mentions tacitly identify and encourage a united readership

which ‘appreciates the emblematic power of certain fictions to map the tribulations of

117

Leonard Woolf, Hunting the Highbrow (Hogarth Essays: Second Series; London: Hogarth Press,

1927) pp.14f 118

Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) p.171 119

Hugh Walpole, 'Review of Festival' Book Society News, November (1931) 1-2, p.1 120

E.M. Delafield, 'The Sincerest Form...' Time and Tide, 30/12/30 (1930a) p.1605

37

their daily lives.’121

These moments go even a step further, and blur the lines between

fiction and daily life, so that the novels are not so much distanced referents as

effectively memories on the same relational level as everyday experience. Burnt

porridge reminds the Provincial Lady of Jane Eyre; seasickness of Mrs. Gamp; the

need to ‘make an effort’ of Mrs. Dombey.122

While Mrs. Pankerton’s references to

‘Dostoeffsky’ and Hardy indicate her character is pretentious,123

the Provincial Lady’s

choices of allusion mark her out as a middlebrow model. When choosing books to

pack for holiday, for example, she ‘[f]inally decide[s] on Little Dorrit and The Daisy

Chain, with Jane Eyre in coat-pocket. Should prefer to be the kind of person who is

inseparable from volume of Keats, or even Jane Austen, but cannot compass this.’124

(It is perhaps surprising to see that Austen cannot be compassed, viewed as

intellectually superior to Dickens, Yonge, and Brontë, given that several reviewers

cite Austen as Delafield’s precedent.125

)

The elaborate process of deciding which books to pack presents the novels as travel

companions; an idea reflected within an article by George Gordon in the August 1931

Book Society News. Gordon sees ‘old and well-tried favourites’ as the reserve of

middlebrows and writes that a holiday is opportunity ‘to escape from the present time

and recover the quieter spaces of one’s past.[…] Mix, therefore, in your holiday

reading the old with the new, and for that time at least let the old predominate.’126

Despite writing in a newsletter intended to sell new books, Gordon sets up an ideal

reader who loves books of the past, and considers them in the manner of social

121

Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s p.173 122

Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.14; Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in America' p.367;

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady Goes Further' p.193 123

Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.98; p.101 124

Ibid.p.86 125

Mather, The Heirs of Jane Austen: Twentieth-Century Writers of the Comedy of Manners pp.43f 126

George Gordon, 'Holiday Reading' Book Society News, August (1931) p.11

38

companions invited into the reader’s life and home. In the same way, Rachel

Ferguson’s semi-fantastic novel The Brontës Went To Woolworths (1931) is based

around this imagined closeness between reader and classic author; the platitude that

‘“They’ll never die […] they’ve made something that’s going to go on”’127

is

transformed into narrative fact (albeit an uncertain one). The family of avid readers

within the novel make a common metaphor literal, and actually receive the Brontës

into their home – with no clear barrier between fantasy and reality. It is precisely this

sense of intimacy which middlebrow readers privilege; the belief in a human

connection, rather than the analytical documentation of a Great Tradition. Members

of this audience do not only know the books well as readers, they feel they know the

characters well, as close social acquaintances. The same intimacy is reflected in

contemporary reviews of the Provincial Lady: ‘The Lady has become as well known

as Queen Victoria and as much loved’; ‘She has, through her diary, become the

intimate friend of hundreds of people’.128

Any supposed gap between literary and

social relations is closed even further through these discourses of intimacy.

Rachel Ferguson’s novel is an example of this identification with ‘the Masters’ taking

place outside of those narratives which seem most closely aligned with the Victorian

classics. While the Provincial Lady novels draw comparison with Jane Austen, and it

does not take too audacious a critic to identify the influence of her great-grandfather

on Monica Dickens’ 1940s comic novels, this sense of literary sympathy is not

exclusive to the domestic narrative. Even middlebrow writers exploring the fantastic

treat this accepted canon as their bedrock and birthright – whether openly, as with The

Brontës Went To Woolworths, or more covertly. H.C. Harwood, reviewing Lolly

127

Rachel Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths (London: Ernest Benn, 1931) p.193 128

Anne Armstrong, 'Review of The Provincial Lady Goes Further' The Saturday Review, 05/11/32

(1932) p.481; Anon., 'Review of Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.1609

39

Willowes, acknowledges this middlebrow embrace of antecedents, when labelling an

exchange between Laura Willowes and Satan not (as might be expected) with

reference to the Bible or Faustus, but ‘the conversations of an elderly Jane Eyre with

a mellow Rochester.’129

The fantastic is not considered to be divorced from the

community’s shared cultural references, whereby middlebrow novels can act as a

form of literary archive or re-imagined oral tradition, preserving (and contemporising)

the reading experiences which influenced the middlebrow readership and helped form

their literary identity – resisting a fantasy which isolates them from a cultural

chronology.

Both antagonistic and generous critics in the 1920s and ‘30s – whether or not they

acknowledged estimable antecedents for middlebrow writing predating the twentieth

century – used an illusory framework of contemporary authors as a substitute for any

semantic consensus. Often this exercise was a matter of simplistic qualitative

comparison – when writing about Dorothy L Sayers, Leavis uses various names for

shorthand assessment: Ouida, Marie Corelli, Baron Corvo (‘better than’), Joyce and

Lawrence (‘worse than’), Naomi Mitchison and Rosamond Lehmann (‘belongs

with’).130

When Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote to Elizabeth Taylor ‘I never see books in

terms of other books, or writers in terms of other writers, and I want simply to

129

H.C. Harwood, 'Review of Lolly Willowes' The Outlook, 06/02/26 (1926) Chatto & Windus Archive

CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of Reading 130

Leavis, 'The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers' pp.334-40. The various interpretations of Sayers’

literary status are illuminating. While Leavis dismisses her (as has been seen), two middlebrow

novelists consider her differently. Rachel Ferguson refers to her as ‘that encyclopaedia of various

specialized knowledge’, and Clemence Dane, in the Book Society News, notes a number of highbrow

quotations in Busman’s Honeymoon, ending her review: ‘Particularly charming is the Vicar with the

passion for cacti! – I dare not say “cactuses” when I review Miss Sayers.’ [Rachel Ferguson,

Passionate Kensington (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939) p.121; Clemence Dane, 'Review of Busman's

Honeymoon' Book Society News, June (1937) p.6]

40

congratulate you on your achievement’131

she was expressing her frustration at an

evaluative framework which relies upon the illusory ability to place authors into

discrete groups – again, more like a social gathering than a literary genetics.

Storm Jameson provides one of few examples where stringent taxonomies are

avoided, and her image of a literary landscape is more egalitarian:

[…] this teeming countryside in which we may meet casually Francis Brett

Young, Walter de la Mare, Maurice Baring, James Joyce, Romer Wilson, D. H.

Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Norman Douglas, C. E. Montague, R. H. Mottram,

Stella Benson, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, T. F. Powys, E.M. Forster,

Hugh Walpole, and a host of other men and women[…] all talented in a high

degree.132

Highbrow and middlebrow authors mingle indiscriminately, and the language of

impromptu social encounter – ‘we may meet casually’ – indicates Jameson’s

middlebrow sensibilities, as does her choice of a ‘teeming countryside’ over the

archetype of urban literary gatherings. (This setting also, of course, is suggestive of a

naturalist’s treatise, placing the reader instead as anthropologist.) The Provincial

Lady novels, despite often referring to Victorian authors, seldom mention living

writers. When these do appear, it is in the literal context of a Time and Tide party and

the names used (including Rose Macaulay, L.A.G. Strong, and Ellen Wilkinson)

appear in the Time and Tide serialisation but are edited out of the published version of

the diaries, perhaps indicative of the transitory nature of such authors as literary

landmarks.133

131

Cited: Elizabeth Jane Howard, Introduction to Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek (London:

Virago, 1951 repr.1985) v-xi, p.v 132

Jameson, The Georgian Novel and Mr. Robinson pp.5f 133

E.M. Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady at the "Time and Tide" Party' Time and Tide, 25/06/32 (1932a)

711-712

41

Understanding an author only in relation to others – who, in turn, are only understood

in relation to others – avoids finding a suitable language to write about them, and acts

as a chain of indefinite receptive deferment, whereby a genuine response can be

perpetually avoided. Dependence upon a network divorced from novels’ contents

becomes closer to gossip than to literary criticism, and begins to resemble society

columns’ ‘list of people present’, or publishers’ advertisements – indeed, Jameson’s

teeming countryside is echoed in this letter sent by James B. Pinker & Sons to Edith

Olivier, enquiring about the possibility of being her agent:

In case my name is unknown to you, I may say that among my clients are Mr.

Arnold Bennett, Mr. John Galsworthy, Mr. A.S.M. Hutchinson, Mr. Hugh

Walpole, Mr. Compton Mackenzie, Mr. de la Mare, Mr. Frank Swinnerton, Mr.

W.W. Jackobs [sic], Mrs. Stockley, and many other well-known authors, and I

should like to be able to add your name to the list.134

In this instance, the writers are evidently listed to impress, rather than analyse – and

come with the ‘Mr’s and ‘Mrs’s favoured by reviewers and publishers, but omitted

from Jameson’s description, giving even greater a sense of being introduced to

luminaries in a social setting.

Certain authors were so exemplary of a ‘brow’ that they could be detached from these

frameworks, and used as shorthand – Hugh Walpole, for instance, is frequently

proffered as a middlebrow-benchmark in the Provincial Lady novels,135

not least for

his role in running the Book Society (some of their own advertisements describe

themselves as ‘Mr. Hugh Walpole and his colleagues’136

). On occasion, an author’s

name need not even be stated openly: side glances were sufficient. J.B. Priestley’s

134

James B. Pinker & Sons, letter to Edith Olivier (09/06/27), Chippenham, Wiltshire and Swindon

History Century, Edith Olivier Papers 982/228 135

For example: Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in America' , p.323; Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in

Wartime' , p.412 136

Book Society, 'A Letter' November (1932) [unpaginated]

42

1932 BBC broadcast ‘To a High-Brow’ (which helped inspire Woolf to write

‘Middlebrow’ as a letter to the New Statesman) dismisses ‘authors entirely without

feeling, who write about human life as an educated wolf might be expected to write

about it’.137

The play on ‘Woolf’/‘wolf’ is self-evident. In return, Woolf’s

‘Middlebrow’ includes the following description of Bloomsbury: ‘a place where

lowbrows and highbrows live happily together on equal terms and priests are not, nor

priestesses, and, to be quite frank, the adjective “priestly” is neither often heard nor

held in high esteem.’138

As well as pejoratively incorporating Priestley’s name,

Woolf converts it from a noun into an adjective. In doing so she linguistically

derogates Priestley to a ‘type’ and removes his authorial individuality, while also

investing the word ‘priestly’ with connotations of false grandeur.

In the same way, Leavis asserts that ‘to the highbrow public “Ethel M. Dell” or

“Tarzan” should be convenient symbols, drawn from hearsay rather than first-hand

knowledge’.139

Ethel M. Dell was the very popular author of over forty romance

novels, generally considered to be towards the lower intellectual end of the

middlebrow, or even, as E.M. Delafield writes when noting the curious similarity

between their names, the reading material of servants.140

In using inverted commas

for both author and character, Leavis reinforces the idea of Dell as a symbol rather

than a real person. She does not attempt to disguise the fact that her judgement is

137

Cited in Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere pp.23f (Cuddy-

Keane’s emphasis.) 138

Woolf, 'Middlebrow (1942)' p.203 139

Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public p.35 140

Delafield reports being told that “My housemaid has shelf upon shelf full of your books”, and

concludes that she has been mistaken for ‘Miss X’ – where ‘Miss X’ is presumably Dell. [Delafield,

'The Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.124]. A spirited defence of Dell, in Patrick Braybrooke, Some

Goddesses of the Pen (London: The C.W. Daniel Company, 1927), that she has ‘the secret of life’

(p.52) could only serve to hinder her reputation amongst intellectuals.

43

made without engaging in a direct reading act – indeed, she is proud of it, and extends

this policy to an imperative, with the modal verb ‘should’.

While Leavis castigates middlebrow readers for undue moral outrage in avoiding

writers like D.H. Lawrence,141

her advocated censorship shows more premeditated

intent than that evinced by the middlebrow, as represented by the Provincial Lady,

who is frequently curious about banned or ‘indecent’ novels:

[…] pallid young man who reads book mysteriously shrouded in Holland cover.

Feel that I must discover what this is at all costs, and conjectures waver between

The Well of Loneliness and The Colonel’s Daughter, until title can be spelt out

upside down, when it turns out to be Gulliver’s Travels. Distressing sidelight

thrown here on human nature by undeniable fact that I am distinctly

disappointed by this discovery, although cannot imagine why.142

Curiosity concerns the social implications of the book in question, and the expected

consequent covert reading act, rather than the text itself. She both gives and

anticipates this voyeuristic judgement, demonstrating the parallel middlebrow codes

of social cohesion and the surreptitious hope that others will not cohere. Rather than

the reading experience itself, the Provincial Lady’s qualms surround the discussion of

literature and the connotations which might reflect upon her, once again socialising

the reading act. When receiving a letter suggesting that her own novel is ‘harmful to

art and morality alike’, it is the thought that her servants might find the letter that

occasions the greatest anxiety.143

These anxieties are most prevalent when trying to

secure a controversial novel in a public arena:

141

Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public p.274 142

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady Goes Further' p.169 143

Ibid. p.127

44

Ask for Symphony in Three Sexes at the library, although doubtfully. Doubt

more than justified by tone in which Mr. Jones replies that it is not in stock, and

never has been.144

Similarly, when the Provincial Lady does consider reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover,

her usual locations of acquiring books prove fruitless:

Conversation in my immediate vicinity concerns […] Lady Chatterley’s Lover,

which everyone except myself seems to have read and admired. I ask unknown

lady on my right if it can be got from the Times Book Club, and she says No,

only in Paris, and advises me to go there before I return home. Cannot,

however, feel that grave additional expense thus incurred would be justified,

and in any case could not possibly explain detour satisfactorily to Robert.145

Although Delafield does report middlebrow opinions which demonstrate some

prudery – ‘old Mrs. B. observes that much that is published nowadays seems to her

unnecessary, and why so much Sex in everything?’146

– literary censorship is not

championed in her writing. Avoidance of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is due to the

impracticality of locating it and bringing it to the home (and the social etiquette of

explaining the purchase to her husband, which would upset domestic equilibrium),

rather than a moralistic imperative regarding the book’s contents. The book would

require smuggling as contraband goods, as though it were illegal drugs; the link

Leavis saw between drugs and low literature is seen by the middlebrow, in terms of

finding, buying, and living with books, to be more applicable to works like Lady

Chatterley’s Lover. Humble suggests that, in bolder middlebrow novels of the period,

familiarity with Lady Chatterley’s Lover ‘is used to suggest broad-minded tolerance

and an openness to new sexual mores and psychological issues’.147

Although the

Provincial Lady’s readers would largely have shared her inability to bring this book to

144

Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.9 145

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady Goes Further' p.141 146

Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.85 147

Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s p.55

45

the home, Delafield relies upon at least a vague awareness of Lawrence’s novel (or,

more precisely, its reputation) in her reader in order for the humour of this moment to

succeed.

In this public forum, the issues of distribution and etiquette combine to reinforce a

peculiarly middlebrow inhibition. While highbrow readers were relatively

unconcerned about the physical procuring of literature, the locations of acquiring and

reading novels were paramount for the middlebrow reader, as were the consequent

codes of social interaction.

The places and communities of middlebrow reading

Location and the construction of communities are central to the identity of ‘brow’

classifications in the period, whether through fixed locations or the absence of them.

Highbrows, especially in popular consciousness, were associated with the specific

location of Bloomsbury – this association was not neutral, and (as with ‘Ethel M.

Dell’ for Leavis or ‘wolf’/‘Woolf’ for Priestley), existed as often dismissive

shorthand. Leonard Woolf satirises this trope by making caustic reference to pseudo-

intellectuals ‘lurking in the undergrowth of Cambridge, Oxford, Chelsea,

Bloomsbury, and other favourable localities’148

, and Virginia Woolf famously queries

the need to mention her location when writing about her work:

[a journalist] always finds space to inform not only myself, who know it

already, but the whole British Empire, who hang on his words, that I live in

Bloomsbury[.] Is your critic unaware of that fact too? Or does he, for all his

intelligence, maintain that it is unnecessary in reviewing a book to add the

postal address of the writer?149

148

Woolf, Hunting the Highbrow p.39 149

Woolf, 'Middlebrow (1942)' p.196

46

By privileging the practical function of Bloomsbury (‘postal address’) over its

ideological or cultural significance, Woolf disingenuously seeks to undermine the

geographical shorthand that, elsewhere, she applies to others – dismissing Rose

Macaulay as among ‘the riff raff of South Kensington culture’ and ‘uneasy about

Bloomsbury’, despite publishing her through the Hogarth Press.150

In turn,

Macaulay’s novel Keeping Up Appearances features a highbrow character bemused

by a middlebrow periodical which refers to Bloomsbury as ‘the very temple of the

intellectuals’.151

In practice, adding this description (with its satirical ‘very’) was

scarcely necessary, since readers were already aware of Bloomsbury’s connotations.

The fact that Titus, Laura’s nephew in Lolly Willowes, lives in Bloomsbury is one of

the several alienating factors when he moves to Laura’s rural home.

Great Mop, Laura’s village, (while aberrational for other reasons) is representative of

the fictive middlebrow location – that is, a type of place, rather than a specific and

locatable area. Creating a firm link between highbrows and a specific locality gives

them an uncomfortable fixity (particularly given modernism’s privileging of fluidity)

whereas middlebrow readers inhabit more anonymous locations. This readership is

defined either by suburbia or by rurality, both imprecise quantities and, since

unplaceable, regarded as threatening – yet their relationship with space is less

exclusive. Desmond MacCarthy refuses entry to all; by being spread out and

150

(Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, 25th

May 1928): Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf:

Volume 3 (1923-1928), eds Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann Banks (New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1975a) p.501. The Hogarth Press published several non-fiction books by Macaulay – for

more on her involvement with The Hogarth Press, see Melissa Sullivan, 'The Middlebrows of the

Hogarth Press: Rose Macaulay, E.M. Delafield and Cultural Hierarchies in Interwar Britain' in Helen

Southworth (ed.) Leonard and Virgnia Woolf, The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) 52-73 151

Macaulay, Keeping Up Appearances p.147

47

unbounded, the places of the middlebrow are closed to no one. Even the privileging

of the individual home as the point of reception, rather than the interactivity of literary

society, amplifies this geographical anonymity and introduces the paradox of

openness and privacy: the suburbs and villages are not exclusive, but the individual

homes are sites of personal acquiring and reading, as opposed to literary salons which,

though exclusive, are not private to the individual. There is no membership test to

pass to own the middlebrow home, but almost all middlebrow fiction reinforces the

importance and sanctuary of the private home, even if only to unsettle it later.

Middlebrow readership, as a group, is conceptual rather than concrete, and is partly

defined by this abstract and dispersed geography. Similarly, the rural middle-class

home could be considered only in the abstract, through representative homes of the

everywoman, such as the Provincial Lady’s and that of Mrs. Miniver (1939) by Jan

Struther, or Laura Willowes’ countryside cottage. It is echoed in the upper-middle

class homes which form the background of the fantastic occurrences which happen to

Agatha Dobenham (The Love-Child), the Tebricks (Lady into Fox), the Carnes (The

Brontës Went To Woolworths), and many others. Whilst the infinite openness of

countryside, in contrast to the enclosure of domestic space, is explored in some

fantastic literature of the period, the provinces were largely viewed by intellectuals as

culturally insignificant and irrelevant. Delafield consistently exploits this perception

in her Provincial Lady novels, basing the second novel of the series in both London

and Devon as a means of comparing a middlebrow experience of the two. Having

been asked to go and read a satire written by her friend Emma that will ‘set the whole

of London talking’, the Provincial Lady says that, instead, she will be returning to the

countryside:

48

What, shrieks Emma, leaving London? Am I mad? Do I intend to spend the

whole of the rest of my life pottering about the kitchen, and seeing that Robert

gets his meals punctually, and that the children don’t bring muddy boots into the

house? Reply quite curtly and sharply: Yes I Do, and ring off – which seems to

me, on the whole, the quickest and most rational method of dealing with

Emma.152

Delafield does not necessarily endorse Emma’s domestic vignette, which Emma

aligns with insanity (indeed, Delafield counters this with ‘most rational’), but this

synecdochical portrait of rural life is pragmatically accepted by the Provincial Lady,

undermining the surreal image Emma conjures as being the antithesis of London.

(Similarly pragmatic is the Provincial Lady’s ability to sever communication by

hanging up – another approach possible in the private home but not in face-to-face

literary society.) What Emma does not recognise is that the provincial, middlebrow

choice is not one of isolation, but performed in a community of others (albeit in the

abstract, and largely anonymous) whose shared outlook helped ensure the success of

Delafield’s novels. While reception of literature in the twentieth century was chiefly

an individualised act, the tradition of concurrent reception and response (found in

reading aloud to a group153

) is re-imagined, rather than replaced.

Reading, for this community, is an essential facet of the apparatus for interpreting and

inhabiting the home. The home is read through the lens of literature, and literature is

read in the midst of the domestic maelstrom: ‘I pack frantically in the intervals of

reading Vice Versa aloud’.154

For the Provincial Lady, both activities here – packing

and reading – are interwoven, equally domestic tasks. Her reading is part of the

152

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady Goes Further' pp.250f 153

Face-to-face reading groups for discussion existed, but tended not to be middlebrow-focused, and

were to a large extent all-male societies. [Jenny Hartley, Reading Groups (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2001) pp.18ff] Elsewhere, reading aloud tends to be in the form of monologue from somebody

granted a dominant position (e.g. an author giving a reading) rather than a democratic experience. 154

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in America' p.280

49

everyday fabric of her activities as wife and mother; the ‘primary duty of every

woman’ according to the final, ironic words of her novel in serialised form, omitted

from the published version.155

Delafield role-plays her own reception within her

novels: the Provincial Lady is the paradigmatic domestic reader, and her engagement

with literature can take place only in snatches. This sense of interruption and

cacophony is mirrored by the diaries’ serialisation in Time and Tide, where

Delafield’s voice is one among many. For example, the first excerpt appears beside a

poem about butterflies by V.H. Friedlaender and a letter castigating conscientious

objectors; nearby paratexts encompass a miscellany of advertisements, including

Viyella’s ‘cosy intimate wear’; Allenby’s throat pastilles, and ‘Face Massage &

Electrolysis: superfluous hair permanently removed leaving no scar’.156

Fiction and

the more mundane or (indeed) pragmatic aspects of the everyday intertwine, with

each new Provincial Lady extract appearing both mise-en-scène and in media res.

The middlebrow becomes part of a discourse about personal cosmetics and health

cures, as well as the minutiae of the day.

Contemporary reviews of the Provincial Lady diaries reflect its interest in the place of

reading, suggesting that ‘[i]t is a book for travelling, it is a book to read aloud, it is a

bedside book’157

and that it ‘should be read over a hot fire’.158

For middlebrow

readers, the place of reading is not simply functional, but has a symbiotically

influential relationship with the book in question. These ‘serving suggestions’, as it

were, indicate the perceived character and role of Delafield’s novels: a model of the

fireside companion, even a like-minded substitute for a spouse. The archetypal

155

E.M. Delafield, 'The Diary of a Provincial Lady' Time and Tide, 13/12/30 (1930b) p.1570 156

Time and Tide (06/12/29), p.1474; p.i; p.1484; p.1483 157

Armstrong, 'Review of The Provincial Lady Goes Further' p.480 158

Marjorie Grant Cook, 'Review of Diary of a Provincial Lady' Times Literary Supplement, 18/12/30

(1930) p.1084

50

depiction of husband and wife by the hearth, later emblematised (and problematised)

in 1945 by Brief Encounter, is distorted to offer the middlebrow novel as a wholly

sympathetic domestic companion.

The pragmatics of the reading process are not ignored – the Provincial Lady

complains of not having time to read, or (as with Lady Chatterley’s Lover) being

unable to access certain books: ‘my own part in [the conversation] being mostly

confined to saying that I haven’t yet read it, and It’s down on my library list, but

hasn’t come, so far.’159

Acquiring books is not an invisible element of the reading

process: Time and Tide, for instance, notes that ‘Readers who obtain the paper from

bookstalls or newsagents are asked to notify the Circulation Manager if they

experience any difficulty or delay in obtaining it.’160

Middlebrow readers are

conscious of the geography and dynamics of procuring books in a manner which

holds too great a taint of commerciality for highbrow readers, unlikely to discuss the

Circulation Manager. As Denham (in Macaulay’s Crewe Train) responds to her

husband’s wish that ‘stupid people’ should not buy his books: ‘it’s mostly stupid

people who buy books or get them from libraries, because intelligent people can

usually get hold of them, if they want to, some other way.”161

In place of literary

connections, exclusive publishing houses, or other minority-focused means,

middlebrow books are located through libraries, street stands, and increasingly, book

societies.

These means of acquiring books all blur the line between public and private: libraries,

for instance, are public buildings offering books to private homes – but books which

159

Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' pp.99f 160

Time and Tide (06/12/29) p.1478 161

Macaulay, Crewe Train p.128

51

have previously inhabited other homes, so that they become effectively shared

between strangers. In Civilization Clive Bell writes that

savage rams and silly sheep are slaves to the gentleman in a frock-coat. Shop-

walkers dictate what should be their most intimate and personal decisions. […]

Messrs. Hatchard and Mudie decide what books they shall read.162

Again using the common ovine metaphor, Bell sees these services as dictators to the

mass, rather than providing an individualised service, and laments that the ‘intimate’

has been made public. Similarly, his almost metonymic image of the ‘gentleman in a

frock-coat’ dehumanises – and de-intellectualises – this exchange of literature. In his

reluctance to acknowledge that reading could be an act of commercial engagement, or

one on the same strata as other activities around the home, he aligns it with the only

domestic practice that requires absolute privacy: the ‘most intimate and personal’

deed is, arguably, sexual intercourse. While Delafield and others celebrate a

taxonomic egalitarianism, which makes literature accessible and practical, Bell

equates this cultural levelling to, at best, unthinking tawdriness and, at worst,

prostitution. Reading as a communal activity becomes, to Bell, an act of exposure; to

the middlebrow public it is a welcome point of connection with others.

‘Good service for the ordinary intelligent reader’: the role of the Book Society

Though highbrow writers might disapprove of the ‘gentleman in the frock-coat’

selling or lending books on the high street, the anonymity and pseudo-privacy of book

societies appeared even more threatening to those such as Leavis, who lamented that

‘a middlebrow standard of values has been set up [and] that middlebrow taste has thus

162

Clive Bell, Civilization: An Essay (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929) p.181

52

been organised [by the Book Society]’.163

Such societies were, indeed, the perfect

representation of the amorphous middlebrow community; ‘compasses of middlebrow

taste’,164

as Bracco writes – emphasising both the individual and the collective.

Books were delivered directly to the home, and the Book Society made the unlikely

claim that ‘study is made of each individual members’ [sic] tastes and special

requirements,’165

yet despite this rhetoric of individualised service, also represented

the joining of separate homes into one collective, if anonymous, group. T.S. Eliot’s

belief in ‘the necessity that a culture should be analysable, geographically, into local

cultures’166

is replaced with the illusion of a homogenous, de-geographical

community of readers – impossible for the outsider to know whether the books were

being read in London or the provinces. Above all, book societies were determinedly

middlebrow in their approach (if not always in their selections), and proud of their

mass circulation. While Scrutiny never printed more than 750 copies per issue in the

1930s, The Book Club (ironically with T.F. Powys, much lauded in Fiction and the

Reading Public, on the Selection Committee) announced itself as having over 125,000

members at the end of that decade.167

Yet they distance themselves from the

lowbrow; the Book Society prospectus is scathing about those ‘book-clubs dealing in

general literature […] at reduced rates […] limited by trade regulation to choosing

works at least twelve months old’, adding that these ‘serve their purpose for a popular

market’.168

The society proclaimed that it was providing ‘a good service for the

ordinary intelligent reader’.169

This slightly paradoxical individual was the ideal

163

Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public p.24 164

Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919-1939 p.11 165

Book Society, 'Prospectus' (1934) p.10 166

Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture p.15 167

Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia

1880-1939 p.7; Book Club, 'Prospectus' (1939[?]) [unpaginated] 168

Book Society, 'Exclusive Privileges of Membership' (1939[?]) p.1 169

J.B. Priestley, in Book Society, 'Some Privileges of Membership' (193[?]). The same phrase –

‘ordinary intelligent reader’ – is used by Ethel Mannin, in The Bookworm’s Turn, published by the

53

audience of the book societies. He/she is unpretentiously average, the everyman, and

yet has above-average aptitude: intelligence without intellectualism.

Chief among these clubs was, indeed, the Book Society, started in April 1929 with a

Selection Committee including Hugh Walpole and J.B. Priestley – and it is worth

noting that, though collectively middlebrow, there was no single voice of the Book

Society. Reviews were written by members of the Selection Committee and varied

widely, from Sylvia Lynd’s forward-looking acceptance of the modern, to Clemence

Dane’s feminism, to the self-proclaimedly traditional and conservative viewpoint of

Walpole.170

Each month this committee offered a selected book, which could be

exchanged for an alternative recommended title if the reader desired. These rules

were laid out in prospectuses with names like ‘Exclusive Privileges of

Membership’171

but were exclusive only to the extent that anybody wishing to become

a member could do so; the semantics of literary gentlemen’s clubs (a common feature

of particularly masculine middlebrow books, like Jeeves and Wooster and Sherlock

Holmes) were borrowed for an inclusive society, where bare economics were the only

barrier to membership.

These semantics may have existed for the purpose of aggrandising customers, but it is

avowedly absent for the book choices. Although they were eclectic in their

recommended titles – including those by D.H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, and

Book Guild, quoted in both Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public pp.24f and Leavis, Mass

Civilisation and Minority Culture pp.20f 170

Walpole recognized this reputation, and whilst usually affirming it, noted in his journal from 1931

that ‘My only trouble in my writing is that, wriggle as I may, I’m definitely old-fashioned. Now I’d

like to be modern. I’d rather be a male Hugh Walpole to a female Virginia Woolf than anything else

on earth.’ Cited: Rupert Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1952) p.328 171

Book Society, 'Exclusive Privileges of Membership' p.1

54

Virginia Woolf172

among the anticipated domestic novels – they did not claim, in the

newsletters which accompanied each month’s book, that every book would be a

lasting classic. Walpole writes in his review of Festival, the selected book for

November 1931, ‘it is not well written in any sense in which good writing means

good writing’.173

As Radway comments, book clubs’ ‘principal aim [… was] not to

place books in the long sweep of literary history but to match readers with books

appropriate to them’,174

rather in the manner of a literary dating agency (and once

more tied to the language of social encounter.) However, the mixture of dogmatism

and liberality in their publications is occasionally illogical – for example, in the 1934

Prospectus:

[The Committee] lay down no literary laws, and do not claim to find monthly

masterpieces, but they state their belief that certain books are well worth

reading, and indeed should not be missed.175

The middlebrow audience were resistant to any suggestion of elitism, but ‘should not

be missed’ hovers over the line between imposed taste and the accepted language of

commerce. The difference between ‘masterpiece’ and ‘well worth reading’ is

essentially one of semantics. ‘Masterpiece’ is deliberately hyperbolic, whereas the

172

Throughout the newsletters Woolf’s name is used as a byword for the great modern novel. In April

1937, for instance, they write ‘Virginia Woolf is said to be among the contemporary writers whose

work is most likely to endure.’ While ‘is said to’ slightly distances the society from the opinion, in

1931 Sylvia Lynd wrote that ‘in The Waves Mrs. Woolf has invented a new method of fiction’. [Anon.,

'Mostly About Authors' Book Society News, April (1937) 16-17, p.17; Sylvia Lynd, 'Review of The

Waves' Book Society News, November (1931a) p.5]. Woolf was not especially grateful, writing to Vita

Sackville-West: ‘Yes, much against my will, L[eonard] insisted upon sending an advance copy [of The

Waves] to the Book Society. But what did Hugh say? Damned it utterly I suppose from your silence

on this head. Please tell me. You know how I mind even the workhouse cats view, vain as I am.’

[Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4 (1931-35), ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London:

Penguin, 1982 repr.1983) p.377]. The comparison is hardly generous, and perhaps Woolf would have

been disappointed that Walpole – often considered synonymous with the Society – did not himself

write the review. Elsewhere (ironically, given highbrow disapproval of the Book Society’s

commercialism), Woolf did prize the financial benefits of being selected. [Woolf, The Diary of

Virginia Woolf: Volume 4 (1931-35) p.160] 173

Walpole, 'Review of Festival' p.2 174

Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class

Desire p.271 175

Book Society, 'Prospectus' p.2

55

litotes of ‘well worth reading’ sounds similar to the sort of recommendation which

could be given casually between individual middlebrow readers – the voice which the

Book Society sought to achieve. By imitating the language of recommendation used

by their customers, the Book Society similarly did not elevate literary discourse above

other discussions and this, alongside their business model, led (as Radway notes) to

accusations that they treated ‘culture as just another consumer product […] packaging

and selling cultural objects as if they were no different from soup, soap, or

automobiles’.176

In this they were not, of course, alone. David Garnett was certainly

aware of the commercial aspect of literary production, writing in his autobiography

about the publication of Lady Into Fox that ‘[t]here was no time to be lost as I wanted

the book out in plenty of time for Christmas.’177

This commoditisation of literature, and the way in which the material value of books

was considered alongside the cerebral, is echoed by discussion of the physicality of

books. When the Provincial Lady writes about Book Society choices, the first things

she recounts from dinner table conversations about The Good Companions and A

High Wind in Jamaica is that they are, respectively ‘a very long book’ and ‘quite a

short book’.178

Although Delafield is satirising a stereotype of middle-class literary

conversation (as she is doing by reporting the discussion as though everyone had

spoken in unison), a Member’s Letter in the 1934 Book Society Prospectus writes

‘Generally, they give me something interesting, and very often long, which is what I

demand’, and amongst the single-line advertisements given in a Book Club magazine

176

Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class

Desire p.244 177

Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest p.247 178

Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' pp.10f

56

is one which states simply ‘542-page novel’.179

A review of Lolly Willowes in the

Chatto & Windus archives has the following section underlined, presumably (judging

by other underlinings in the archive) by a publisher looking for advertisement content:

I enjoyed reading it, and I think many others will do so; and the binding and

presentation of the book are so beautiful that it makes a desirable possession.180

Although this review, in Granta, also included a favourable appraisal of Warner’s

writing, it is the physicality of reading (or at least purchasing and owning) that is

highlighted by the publisher.

While the rhetoric of the Book Society avoids the language of elitism, it is closer to

that of prescription, offering a cure – again blurring distinctions between mind and

body. Joan Rubin writes, of The Book-of-the-Month Club, ‘the particular ailment club

membership promised to heal was […] the modern anxiety about the self.’181

The

cure offered was not for ignorance, or even for a lack of entertainment, but for social

dis-ease. While middlebrow culture opposed the idea of a limited canon (or, more

importantly, proscription of reading outside this canon) they promoted the idea of

choosing books for social acceptance. The initial Prospectus of the Book Society

frames this in fantastic imagery: ‘only the man who has not read the outstanding book

of the day is a lonely soul locked out of the fairy palace’, adding that ‘[t]he average

man is influenced […] most emphatically of all by finding himself at a dinner table

where some book he has not read forms the topic of conversation’.182

179

Book Club, 'Additional Books' ([undated]) [unpaginated] 180

G.E.G, ‘Lollypops’, Granta (12/02/26), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31,

1926), University of Reading 181

Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (London; Chapel Hill, NC: The University

of North Carolina Press, 1992) pp.98f 182

Book Society, 'The Books You Read' (1929) p.1

57

For middlebrow readers, the dinner table was indeed one of few places where literary

discussion was widely accepted and expected, without associations of pretension – for

instance, a review of Lady Into Fox calls it a ‘quaint little thing, which has given us

something to talk about at dinner parties’.183

The Book Society Prospectus makes

overt the connection between eating and reading: ‘Some books are to be tasted, others

to be swallowed, and some few to be cherished, yet of making books there is no end;

and much study is a weariness of the flesh.’184

With a whimsical reference to

Ecclesiastes 12, this prospectus is flippantly comparing itself to Scripture – taking the

common metaphor of books-as-sustenance and essential urge, and making it closer to

a moral imperative. For middlebrow readers, however, there is another significant

comparison between food and books. Both reading and eating were governed by a

framework of etiquette and social expectation, partly done for one’s own benefit and

partly for the appraisal of others.

For the value of these ‘discussable’ books, aesthetically and culturally, Book Society

members had to trust the distant arbiters of the Selection Committee. Even while part

of the middlebrow community, the committee necessarily rose above the readers, their

biographical material stressing their educated and successful backgrounds, even

stating their first class degrees. Though the Book Society’s committee never morphed

into ‘Judges’, as the Book-of-the-Month Club’s did, they had the power of both

choosing and reviewing the books in their Book Society News – the word chosen for

the publication indicates the scientific rather than the artistic, suggesting objective fact

and reporting of events, when in fact it held necessarily subjective reviews. Despite

183

English Herald Abroad (April 1923), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/25 (Press Cuttings vol.23,

1922), University of Reading 184

Book Society, 'The Books You Read' p.1

58

anti-elitist rhetoric, the Book Society could never claim to be democratic: the

middlebrow did not reject the idea of guidance, and developed trust in these voices.

This trust was not, however, absolute and unthinking. Though booksellers185

and

intellectuals alike responded with concern to the homogenisation of books within

middle-class homes, and consequently the topics of conversation within those homes,

middlebrow assimilation was not as uncomplicated as both book societies and their

critics implied. Although it served the purposes of the Book Society, and those of its

detractors, to suggest wholehearted endorsement by their audience, in truth

middlebrow readers were neither oblivious to, nor wholly acquiescent with, attempts

at creating similitude. They were not ‘infantilized, passive dupes’.186

Diary of a

Provincial Lady mentions six of the first thirty Book Society selected titles (and was

itself selected in December 1930), but the Provincial Lady still openly criticises

certain choices,187

and in Time and Tide Delafield ends a spoof review of Evelyn

Waugh’s Black Mischief with the tongue-in-cheek words:

(Publisher’s Query: But is that the end?

Author’s Reply: I’m afraid so. Rotten, isn’t it?

Publisher’s Note: That’s all right, my dear chap – we’re sending it to The Book

Society.)188

Echoing the use of the parenthesised ‘aside’ which often appears in the Provincial

Lady series, Delafield is satirising the prevalent disregard for the Book Society among

highbrow writers and publishers (which was still coupled with a recognition of its

185

Woolf reports booksellers being ‘violently against the Book Society[…] they say it is all a wash out

and favouritism.’ [VW to Vita Sackville-West (8? May 1930), Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia

Woolf: Volume 4 (1929-1931), eds Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann Banks (New York: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1975b) p.165] 186

Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class

Desire p.227 187

‘Read Hatter’s Castle after they have gone to bed, and am rapidly reduced to utmost depths of

gloom. Mentally compose rather eloquent letter to Book Society explaining that most of us would

rather be exhilarated than depressed’. [Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady Goes Further' p.155] 188

E.M. Delafield, 'Review of Black Mischief' Time and Tide, 15/08/32 (1932b) 1109-1110, p.1110

59

lucrative possibilities), yet tacitly acknowledging at least some recognition of the truth

of this slur. The Provincial Lady goes on to offer resistance to the idea of readerly

homogeneity asserted by book societies:

Arrival of Book of the Month choice, and am disappointed. History of a place I

am not interested in, by an author I do not like. Put it back into its wrapper

again, and make fresh choice from Recommended List. Find, on reading small

literary bulletin enclosed with book, that exactly this course of procedure has

been anticipated, and that it is described as being “the mistake of a lifetime”.

Am much annoyed, although not so much at having made (possibly) mistake of

a lifetime, as at depressing thought of our all being so much alike that intelligent

writers can apparently predict our behaviour with perfect accuracy.189

Delafield writes ‘Book of the Month’ here, but it is possible that this entry, dated

November 14th

1929, refers to the Book Society’s selected title for November 1929:

Gallipoli Memories by Compton Mackenzie. The Provincial Lady’s annoyance at the

‘thought of our all being so alike’ is compromised by the fact that the diaries rely

upon the same concept of a shared middlebrow outlook. The ‘our’ in that sentence is

indicative of Delafield’s appeal to a middlebrow shared experience – even the shared

experience of resisting uniformity. Once again, individualism and collectivity

paradoxically merge, in Delafield’s resistance to the analysis of a species or genus of

writer and reader – since she is acting in both roles in this excerpt, offering her

character as the paradigmatic reader, while inevitably conscious of her status as a

writer for the market she is discussing.

The fantasy of the ideal home

By privileging the home as the point of reception, and celebrating it as the shared

point of collective response (either through dinner parties or through an abstract

189

Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.6

60

community of readers), book societies supported the cult of the home which many

critics have identified as a facet of the aftermath of the First World War.190

The love

for home is seen throughout many documentations of the period, and the following is

one example from a multitude. Maud Churton Braby writes immediately after the

war, in Modern Marriage and How To Bear It, that a

passionate love of home is one of the most marked feminine characteristics; I

don’t mean love of being at home, as modern women’s tastes frequently lie

elsewhere, but love of the place itself and the desire to possess it.191

Braby highlights a relationship with space, in opposition to the act of occupying that

space. It is identification of a space as ‘home’ that is paramount. Although this might

be expected to be the dominant characteristic of men returning home from the

radically undomesticated space of the trenches (in terms of domestic ownership,

potentially just as much a no-man’s-land as the area thus named), Braby identifies it

as characteristically feminine – and separates ‘tastes’ from passions and desires.

Tastes may change, but Braby points towards an innate need to demarcate and possess

a home territory – reflected in the dynamics of spatial conflict in Lolly Willowes (as

will be explored in chapter five) and the significance of homes throughout other

middlebrow fantastic novels.

This love for home is shown, ever increasingly, in middlebrow novels of the interwar

years. As Sylvia Lynd writes in a review of Lady Into Fox in Time and Tide:

[The Victorians] did not give us the sound of a thimble hemming shirt frills or

the look of sunlight on a glass case of wax fruits. But nowadays everything

190

Including, among many, Briganti and Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E.H.

Young and Deirdre Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty: Women Between the Wars 1918-1939 (London:

Pandora, 1989). 191

Maud Churton Braby, Modern Marriage and How To Bear It (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1919)

p.31

61

claims our notice. We are acutely aware of whatever touches our senses,

however light its touch.192

This observation of the everyday is not a uniquely middlebrow trait, of course. It is

perhaps the greatest point of overlap between the middlebrow and the modernist, seen

in the focus upon domestic minutiae in the work of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and

Katherine Mansfield, to name representatives of many. Where they differ is in the

middlebrow sense of ownership over the ordinary, as distinct from the avant-garde

chronicling of the mundane. Lynd’s review reveals the significance of a shared

outlook; repeated first person plural pronouns indicate that the middlebrow reader

treats these recognitions of everyday insignificances as the emblems of community.

By privileging the home, and the tiny details of its mechanics (which are, here,

determinedly middle-class) the I/you orchestration of author/reader, and the many ‘I’s

of many readers, become ‘us’, ‘our’, and ‘we’.

This gaze upon the trivialities of the domestic is not a looking-in or a looking-out, but

a looking-around. One of the fundamental bases for these novels is, as mentioned,

mimesis. Delafield claims to be frustrated by queries regarding ‘how much of the

[Provincial Lady] was a transcription of real life’,193

but she draws constantly upon

shared loci of her readership’s identity, incorporating mimesis to the extent of writing

as though there were no literary barrier between her accounts and her audience’s lives.

Whether discussing the likelihood of romance with a stranger on the bus, or the effect

of weeping on make-up, the Provincial Lady repeatedly asserts the sentiment that

192

Sylvia Lynd, 'New Novels' Time and Tide, 08/12/22 (1922) 1184-1185, p.1185 193

Delafield, 'The Diary of a Provincial Lady' : Delafield asserts that the Provincial Lady ‘was never

intended as a self-portrait’ (p.127) but ironically did herself sit for Arthur Watts’ illustrations (p.130).

62

‘Real life, as usual, totally removed from literary conventions’.194

It is the language

of autobiography, which seeks to surmount the chasm between lived experience and

the (necessarily artificial) documentation of it. Alison Light suggests that one of the

reasons literature of this variety is ‘peculiarly resistant to analysis’ is because of its

‘apparent artlessness and insistence on its own ordinariness’.195

This insistence

certainly resists traditional apparatus for literary analysis, but is itself worthy of

enquiry; a fundamental facet of the middlebrow, rather than a cloudy obscuring of its

nature.

Similarly, the middlebrow novel as a whole relies upon mimesis in terms of attitude

and outlook, rather than (necessarily) verisimilitude. Although most focus upon the

domestic, it is this shared attitudinal basis which is most significantly mimetic. While

contemporary reviews comment that Delafield’s novels are successful because they

are ‘true to life’; ‘steer the safe course between truth and burlesque’, or the reviewer’s

own ‘daily life is cast in much the same sphere’, the same mimetic effect extends to

novels not intended to mirror the everyday so accurately.196

In this way, fantastic

middlebrow novels do not lose their hold on the advantages of mimesis simply

because they are impossible; indeed, the establishment of familiar stances and the

normative is even more essential, as shall be seen, in order for other aspects of the

familiar to be effectively disruptive.

194

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady Goes Further' p.216; Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in America'

p.281; Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in Wartime' p.460 195

Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars p.11 196

Cook, 'Review of Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.1084; J.E. Arrowsmith, 'Review of Diary of a

Provincial Lady' London Mercury, February (1931) p.385; C.E. Bechhofer Roberts, 'Review of The

Provincial Lady in America' Time and Tide, 22/09/34 (1934) p.1167

63

The anthropologist Alison Clarke writes that ‘[h]istorically, the construction of the

household as an expressive form has been associated with the consolidation and

formation of middle-class identity’, adding that ‘home [is] a process, as opposed to an

act of individual expressivity’.197

This consolidation and expression is a communal

action in literature, where it helps establish the middlebrow voice, but Clarke points

out that it also dominates the establishment of the middle-class home. The household

may be individual, and the dynamics of privacy always exist alongside the recognition

of a shared community, but the existence of an ideal home is vital to middlebrow

identity (and to the dissemination and acceptance of novelistic mimesis), even while

this stable home is both undetermined and undermined. This construct is essential as

a normative structure, but not an actual entity.

Bachelard writes that ‘[a] house constitutes a body of images that give mankind

proofs or illusions of stability.’198

The difference between ‘proof’ and ‘illusion’ is

absolute, but perhaps Bachelard uses the word ‘proof’ with irony, suggesting that

proofs can be identified if the observer chooses to consider them as such: the ultimate

difference between proof and illusion is the eventual conclusion at which the observer

arrives, and to some the existence of strong walls and unmoved objects may constitute

a broad ontological truth (but Bachelard, of course, undermines this potential truth;

the need for ‘proof’ already assumes a faltering faith.)

His comment can be extended beyond the individual home to the concept of the

home, which is itself a ‘body of images’ intended to offer stability. The great

197

Alison J. Clarke, 'The Aesthetics of Social Aspiration' in Daniel Miller (ed.) Home Possessions:

Material Culture behind Closed Doors (Oxford: Berg, 2001) 23-45, pp.24f 198

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1958

repr.1994) p.17

64

middlebrow fantasy, unravelling in the period, is that of the stable home and (thus) the

stable household. As Charlotte Haldane writes in 1927:

“The Home” cannot merely be defined as the place we live in. It includes the

people we live with. […] But so long as a private, as opposed to a communal,

dwelling, continues to house individuals either singly or in small family groups,

an interest in its structural organization must persist if the institution is not to

alter unrecognizably or to decay. Profound alterations, definite signs of decay,

some pessimists declare, are at present appearing in the home. The private

home does still lack the applied fruits of scientific research on a really practical

scale, while the asylum, the prison, the hospital enjoy them.199

Her initial point is, perhaps, obvious. Few would dissociate the home from the people

within it. But Haldane does draw attention to a growing awareness of disorder and

‘decay’ in the family unit – yet seems unconsciously to resist this statement, by

modifying the ‘we’ of her first two sentences with ‘individuals’, ‘its’, ‘the institution’,

and other substitutions which replace the personal pronoun with labels indicating

authorial detachment. Mention of asylums, prisons, and hospitals may be intended to

act in contrast to the individual home (in terms of ‘scientific research’), but

comparison inevitably suggests the taint of insanity, criminality, or illness upon the

ordinary family home – or at least the disorder concomitant with these, and the

artificial domesticity of these institutions.200

The home in flux

As Bachelard writes, ‘the house furnishes us with dispersed images and a body of

images at the same time’201

– this paradox becomes more obvious in this period,

where great changes (the returning of soldiers; Freudianism; sexual politics; the role

199

Charlotte Haldane, Motherhood and its Enemies (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927) p.122 200

Mezei and Briganti include prisons amongst examples of ‘domestic spaces [that] criss-cross and

destabilize the already uncertain borders between inside and outside and between the public and private

spheres’. [Briganti and Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E.H. Young p.19] 201

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space p.3

65

of servants) were partially acknowledged and partially ignored, recognising instability

(dispersed images) while still refusing to relinquish stability (a body of images).

Briganti and Mezei note:

As represented in the novel, home and house are associated with comfort,

privacy, belonging and well being, whether present or absent, and most

importantly with control […] For many women writers and their characters, the

domestic sphere thus offered a site for potential control over material objects,

household duties, family members and servants.202

Although this is a reductive view of ‘the novel’ (and one which is later significantly

and sophisticatedly developed in their monograph) it is an indication of the battle

lines drawn between the idealised (general) home and the subverted (individual)

home. Novels of the period were beginning to demonstrate the uncontrollability of

the home, owing to the societal changes mentioned above (among many more), and

Briganti and Mezei adroitly make reference to ‘site for potential control’, rather than

actual control. This elusive control is an element of the ideal home, and a latent

potential, rather than a practicable possibility, alongside the inevitable instability of

both home and household. Humble gives a range of examples which demonstrate

‘Bohemianism, casualness, and an expressed disregard for the conventions’203

in the

face of changing or unwinding domestic ideology, but there are just as many fictional

homes which remain (like that, for instance, of Agatha in The Love-Child) trapped in

the ideology of the past; Agatha feels she must stay ‘furtively watching the hands of

the clock moving minute by minute towards the bedtime hour of ten’204

rather than

sleep when she wishes. Many middlebrow characters embody this timid obedience to

rigors of the past, even while the structures of the house and household are evidently

under threat and in flux.

202

Briganti and Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E.H. Young pp.18f 203

Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s p.148 204

Edith Olivier, The Love-Child (London: Martin Secker, 1927) p.11

66

The idea of the house in flux is shown through various literary techniques in the

period. These range from unusual perspectives on, and descriptions of, the domestic

(echoing the 1930s emergence of film noir, with its unusual camera angles used to

defamiliarise the familiar) to literal depictions of the shifting home in fantastic novels

(a disappearing and reappearing staircase in David Lindsay’s The Haunted Woman,

for instance, where the house is described as ‘somehow […] discordant’205

), but chief

among ways of illustrating the house in flux are the anthropomorphic house and the

synergetic house.

The anthropomorphic house offers a glimpse of the fantastic, as it is a metaphor of

metamorphosis, without leaving the realms of imagery for the sphere of the fantastic.

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s interest in the possession and possessiveness of houses in

Lolly Willowes is preceded by many depictions of anthropomorphised houses,

including Laura Willowes’ first house that is ‘like an old blind nurse sitting in the sun

and ruminating past events’ (an image to which she returns in her poem ‘Sparrow

Hall’, which opens “Who lives in this house, / That is so old and grey, / Like a sleepy

old nurse’).206

In these two instances, Warner maintains the detachment between the

fantastic and the non-fantastic by using simile rather than metaphor – it is not

suggested that the house is a nurse, even linguistically (for metaphor does not intend

to deceive the reader – indeed it has failed if it does – it only wears the mantle of

linguistic deception). Elsewhere in Lolly Willowes, however, Warner describes a

205

David Lindsay, The Haunted Woman (Edinburgh: Canon, 1922 repr.1987) p.35 206

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes (London: Virago, 1926 repr.2007) p.41; Sylvia Townsend

Warner, Time Importuned (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928) p.86. Whether intentionally or not, these

images are strikingly similar to the ‘elderly grey nurse’ next to whom Peter Walsh sits in Mrs.

Dalloway. [Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925 repr.2009) p.47]

67

‘small surprised cottage near the church’,207

without the alleviation of simile. Yet she

also doesn’t mention any particular human character; the description is only

anthropomorphic if surprise is considered a uniquely human trait. Instead, Warner

attributes emotions and reactions to houses – in a letter to William Maxwell she

describes one as ‘lonely, having lost eleven neighbours’208

– bypassing comparison

with humans, and destabilising the relationship between the two. The same refusal of

domestic taxonomy is reversed in Lolly Willowes: ‘They could look after Lolly.

Henry was like a wall, and Caroline’s breasts were like towers.’209

People and

buildings are merged into one stronghold. As Rosemary Sykes has noted, Warner’s

image is borrowed from the Old Testament book Song of Solomon.210

In its Biblical

context, it follows a verse about a ‘little sister’, appropriately (since Henry and

Caroline are Laura’s brother and sister-in-law) – ‘If she is a door / we will enclose her

with panels of cedar’ – auguring the entrapment and depersonalisation Laura will feel.

Blurred lines between house and self have been immortalised in the trope of room-as-

psyche, developed by Jung and popularised in fiction by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s

The Yellow Wallpaper (1891), but in many cases it is too simplistic a correlation.

Instead, in many novels (particularly in Lolly Willowes) houses are shown

synergetically to affect or reflect self, rather than act as a metaphor for the mind.

Bachelard states that ‘[s]pace that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot

remain indifferent space subject to the measure and estimates of the surveyor’.211

207

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.122 208

Sylvia Townsend Warner, William Maxwell, and Michael Steinman, The Element of Lavishness:

Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner & William Maxwell (Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001) p.131 209

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.81 210

Rosemary Sykes, 'The Willowes Pattern' The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 2001

(2001) 1-17, p.8. The alluded verse is Song of Songs 8:10a ‘I am a wall / and my breasts are like

towers.’ 211

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space p.xxxvi

68

While houses in non-fantastic novels remain the same size (although even here

Bachelard refers to the imprecision of ‘estimates’), they are altered by inhabitancy. It

is not simply owners’ perspective which Bachelard suggests changes, but rather it is

the space itself which is no longer ‘indifferent’, following the same semi-

anthropomorphism of Warner’s writing.

The mutual affect of houses is firmly attested in interwar non-fiction, as well as

fiction, and is not just the preserve of fantastic or quasi-fantastic novels (like The

Brontës Went To Woolworths, where the narrator Deirdre claims that ‘in my own

experience, new places invariably own me, until I have fought them down.’)212

Marjorie Hillis writes in Live Alone and Like It that the home

should reflect your personality – and it will, whether you want it to or not.

There is nothing more tell-tale than a room that has been lived in. It can be

gracious or artful, masculine or feminine, ignorant or altered. It will give you

away to everyone who comes in, and it will influence your moods and your

morale.213

In statements like this, there is no clear distinction between material and non-material

impressions made on the house. While the human is considered to change mentally

and emotionally,214

Hillis offers the room a list of adjectives which could be either

traits or visual aspects – domestic space again hovers on the border of

anthropomorphism, with the added dimension that it is involuntary for the inhabitant

(‘whether you want it to or not’), who thus loses agency over the synergy of their

212

Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths p.19 213

Marjorie Hillis, Live Alone and Like It (London: Duckworth, 1936) p.62 214

Charlotte Cowdroy similarly depicts the house as an agent of change, writing that the ‘order, beauty,

and general atmosphere of the home in which [a child’s] life unfolds will profoundly modify his

character and whole outlook on life.’ It is a point echoed in Edith Olivier’s autobiography, where she

describes living in Salisbury’s Cathedral Close and ‘observing how much the beauty and character of

the houses there affected the people who lived in them’, going on to suggest that this was a catalyst for

her novel The Seraphim Room. [Charlotte Cowdroy, Wasted Womanhood (London: George Allen &

Unwin, 1933) p.95; Olivier, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley: Personal Memories p.294]

69

home. For the middlebrow reader, as iterated above, the home is the main point of

literary engagement (both physically and thematically) and this sense of the malleable

house, reflecting and affecting the reader, is amplified by the situating of the reading

experience within a territory that is neither stable nor independent of the reader.

The place of narratives within the house (the books being read) is further complicated

by common analogies of the house itself as narrative, and of narratives as houses. It is

a multifaceted, overlapping series of images that demonstrate how complex the

mimetic reading of novels like the Provincial Lady series can truly be. For example,

Warner wrote to Garnett in 1924 about the construction of short stories:

First we build our houses of air and geometry. The stairs that no foot can tread

go up undeviatingly, and underneath there is a convenient cupboard in which we

can house darkness (or coats and hats: just as we please). Then we begin to

write and build them of brick. The horror is, not that the bricks are square and

solid, but that they are an insult to geometry, not a pure right angle among them,

and no more solid than a crumpled mosquito net.215

These comparisons are not newly-developed in the interwar period – they are perhaps

as old as narratives themselves (it is probable that ‘story’ and ‘storey’ have the same

etymology216

) – but the emphasis on homes in these decades makes the allusions more

marked. Particularly pertinent is Warner’s mention of the author’s potential to ‘house

darkness (or coats and hats: just as we please).’ She implies that the line between the

strange (or macabre) and the prosaic is unstable, and easily able to be crossed. And

yet the ‘horror’ for her is not the darkness that can be woven into a story, but the

instability of writing and the lack of control the writer has over even these fictitious,

metaphorical houses.

215

Sylvia Townsend Warner, David Garnett, and Richard Garnett, Sylvia and David: The Townsend

Warner/Garnett Letters (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994) p.17 216

"story | storey, n.2". OED Online, Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/190982

(accessed July 29, 2013)

70

The same frailty and uncontrollability of space is seen in many aspects of middle-

class homes in the 1920s and ‘30s. Primarily this lack of control is witnessed

metaphorically, in the ways the home is considered by its inhabitants, but it is also

enacted spatially, with regard to areas of the house which were ‘out of bounds’, or

considered by the owners of the house to be (literally and figuratively) beneath them.

Servants and the geography of the home

The kitchen is the epicentre of the domestic – indeed, a servant working there was

often known metonymically as ‘the domestic’ – but for middle-class families in the

interwar period, it was often an area which could not be accessed: the geography of

the middlebrow home remained influenced and subverted by the co-existence of

servants. Although the number of middle-class homes with servants was decreasing

fairly sharply throughout these decades,217

the impact made by this sharing of space

was proportionally concentrated in instances were servants were still employed.

Servants had always represented an unknowable alternate reality sharing the same

domestic space – that is, they were in the home, but not of the home. Only in the

1920s, however, were servants’ desires and motivations beginning to be truly

explored. They were becoming recognised as individuals rather than automatons (or

‘domestic appliances’218

), and less depersonalised.219

(Daisy, in Rose Macaulay’s

217

‘There was a sharp fall in entry into domestic service in this period; in 1901 42 per cent of the

female workforce were employed as domestic servants, but by 1931 that had dropped to 30 per cent.’

[Anthea Todd, Women's Writing in English: Britain 1900-1945 (London: Longman, 1998) p.19] 218

Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s p.121 219

Deirdre Beddoe documents, at the beginning of this period, the ‘the de-personalising nature of their

experience. Servants with ‘fancy’ names would be renamed by their employers as plain Mary.’

[Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty: Women Between the Wars 1918-1939 p.62]

71

Keeping Up Appearances, counters the idea that servants are an amorphous, identical

mass, arguing that “morning women can’t be all like one another. Going out to work

in people’s houses in the morning can’t make thousands of women alike. Why should

it?’220

) The transition was gradual, and during the 1920s servants were often

considered effectively both human and un-human – or at least both family and non-

family. Violet Firth’s The Psychology of the Servant Problem (1925) is emblematic

of the changing flow of contemporary discussion. Firth not only introduces the

humanity of servants, but discusses their relationship to domestic space: ‘the house in

which a domestic servant is employed is her home […] she can have no other’221

–

and yet even her title emphasises the perspective of the employer rather than the

employee: it seems unlikely that any servant ever referred to the Servant Problem

(usually given with these capitalised letters).

Ever the middle-class representative, the Provincial Lady does mention the Servant

Problem (or, in her case, ‘the servant problem’ and ‘the servant difficulty’222

) but not

with the genteel venom seen in Hugh Braun’s 1940 work The Story of the English

House, where he describes ‘[t]he ever-increasing menace of the Servant Problem’ as

the cause of an exodus from the house to ‘the labour-saving delights of the mass-

production Flat.’223

He adds that the ‘emancipation of women and consequent

Servant Problem sounded the death-knell of the dwelling-house.’224

Only from a

certain viewpoint could ‘emancipation’ equate ‘menace’ – although many

middlebrow novelists portray their middle-class characters being at the mercy of their

220

Macaulay, Keeping Up Appearances p.59 221

Violet Firth, The Psychology of the Servant Problem (London: C.W. Daniel 1925) p.68 222

Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.8; p.40 223

Hugh Braun, The Story of the English House (London: B.T. Batsford, 1940) p.v 224

Ibid. p.110

72

servants, in what Alison Light terms ‘a compensating and reassuring fantasy’.225

Braun does highlight, though, the significant effect on middle-class choice of homes

occasioned by the revolution in the number of servants, and attitudes towards them.

A year earlier than Braun, in a review of a quintessential middlebrow novel, Mrs.

Miniver, E.M. Forster writes:

The castles and the great mansions are gone, we have to live in semi-detached

villas instead, they are all we can afford, but let us at all events retain a

Tradesman’s Entrance. The Servants’ Hall has gone; let the area-basement take

its place. The servants themselves are going; Mrs. Miniver has four, to be sure,

but many a suburban mistress batters the registry offices in vain. The servants

are unobtainable, yet we still say, “How like a servant!” when we want to feel

superior and safe.226

As with all middle-class accounts of the lack of servants, the pronouns are decidedly

on the side of the employer, even while Forster recognises foolishness and hypocrisy

in the employer’s stance. He highlights the importance (for employers) of

maintaining a ‘Tradesman’s Entrance’ and, by endowing it with capitalized letters,

emphasises the perceived significance – even sanctity – of this aspect. The ways in

which people enter a home are fundamentally significant as indicators of their

relationship with the household, and the power they have (or do not have) in that

relationship. By making the hierarchy of occupants tangible and spatially divided, the

dynamics within the home are predetermined by access to the home. Doors and

windows – that is, entrances and exits – are also often significant as predictions of the

fantastic, prefiguring the moment of revelation with a strange, but non-fantastic,

225

Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars p.119. Among

various examples in fiction, the Provincial Lady suggests that ‘[s]ervants, in truth, make cowards of us

all’, and Agatha in The Love-Child often worries about being ‘the Miss Bodenham her maids expected

her to be’. Whether disingenuous or otherwise, this portrait of the servants as covert masters was

common in 1920s novels, and part of coping with change in a once-stable relationship. [Delafield,

'Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.97; Olivier, The Love-Child p.20] 226

E.M. Forster, 'Mrs. Miniver (1939)' Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold & Co.,

1951c) 305-308, p.307

73

architectural domestic detail. In Harriet Hume, ‘fantastically enough, there was no

entrance to Harriet’s abode’; in Rachel Ferguson’s A Harp in Lowndes Square, where

scenes from the past appear on the stairs, ‘[w]indows and doors in the upper regions

of the five-storied house fitted ill’.227

Instability creeps into the novels through

domestic curiosities and eccentricities, acting as harbingers of the fantastic.

For those households which (against Braun’s and Forster’s generalisations) remained

in the same location, and kept the physical structure of the house consistent, the

engagement with space still metamorphosed as the status of servants evolved.

Woolf’s statement that ‘in or about December, 1910, human character changed’ is

often repeated; less frequently mentioned is that one of her primary illustrations

concerns interaction with servants. She was perhaps prescient, though, and certainly

hyperbolic in describing ‘the Georgian cook […] a creature of sunshine and fresh air;

in and out of the drawing-room’ in contrast to the ‘Victorian cook […] like a

leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable’.228

In reality,

as Forster’s mention of ‘area-basements’ suggests, many Georgian (relating here, of

course, to George V) middle-class houses still had a literal division between upstairs

and downstairs. Violet Firth acknowledges the impossibility of understanding servant

psychology ‘from an above-stairs Olympus’,229

using a semantics of domestic

placement also seen in many contemporary novels. In Lettice Cooper’s The New

227

Rebecca West, Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (London: Virago, 1929 repr.1980) p.13; Rachel

Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936) p.7. Similarly, the house in

which Silvia Fox (the lady of Lady into Fox) was raised had ‘no proper road to it, which is all the more

remarkable as it is the principal, and indeed the only, manor house for several miles round.’ [Garnett,

Lady into Fox p.3] 228

Virginia Woolf, 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924)' in Leonard Woolf (ed.) Collected Essays (1;

London: Chatto & Windus, 1966) 319-337, p.320 229

Firth, The Psychology of the Servant Problem p.8

74

House (1936) the servant issue is no longer new, but the servants’ domain is still

depicted as incomprehensible and foreign:

[Rhoda] always felt shy when she penetrated to that downstairs world. The life

lived so near to them and so far apart from them was a dark continent, full of

unexplored mystery.230

This description would aptly fit a voyage across the world, yet it is the dynamic

within a single domicile. Many fantastic or fantasy novels incorporate the idea that

the house is flexible and hides greater expanses than initially appears, from David

Lindsay’s The Haunted Woman and C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and the

Wardrobe (1950) to Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) – but this unstable

geography of the home need not be fantastic. Areas of the house that are seldom or

never accessed (to quote Rachel Ferguson’s Alas, Poor Lady, ‘naturally one never

went into the kitchen’231) become akin to fantastic realms, both inaccessible and

untranslatable. The quarters and activities of the servants are given this inscrutability

in Lolly Willowes:

Bells were answered, meals were served, all that appeared was completion. Yet

unseen and underground the preparation and demolition of every day went on,

like the inward persistent workings of heart and entrails. Sometimes a crash, a

banging door, a voice upraised, would rend the veil of impersonality. And

sometimes a sound of running water at unusual hours and a faint steaminess in

the upper parts of the house betokened that one of the servants was having a

bath.232

Laura recognises that the servants perform human functions, and the ‘veil of

impersonality’ is not absolute, but their actions are still chiefly presented in the

passive voice, excluding the servants themselves from the actions they perform – and

230

Lettice Cooper, The New House (London: Persephone Books, 1936 repr.2004) p.100. Quoted by

Beauman, A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-39 p.153 231

Ferguson, Alas, Poor Lady p.119 232

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.47

75

although they are compared to elements of the human body (‘heart and entrails’)

rather than cogs or machinery, this portrayal of servants still hovers between the

human and non-human. Vita Sackville-West’s The Heir (1922) – a novella about the

captivating power of a house over its reluctant owner, who comes to love it deeply –

incorporates a more unalloyed horror at the idea of servants pursuing human

activities:

In the hall he hesitated, uncertain as to which was the door of the library, afraid

that if he opened the wrong door he would find himself in the servants’ quarters,

perhaps even open it on them as they sat at supper.233

All three instances – from Cooper, Warner, and Sackville-West – demonstrate an

anxiety about discovering and trespassing into servants’ quarters, as though they

might appear arbitrarily and without warning. Their areas of the house are considered

(by the characters focalised in these excerpts) to be imprecisely laid out, unlocatable

(‘the upper parts of the house’), and disturbing the geographical equilibrium of the

home so fundamental to a middlebrow sense of placement.

The stability of the middlebrow home depended also upon the stability of the

middlebrow family. Many interwar influences threatened the supposed

invulnerability of this institution – from the number of unmarried women to the

popularisation of the Oedipus and Electra Complexes – and the status of servants was

also amongst these influences. As well as creating curious spatial tensions within the

home, they were both family and not-family (to take a small etymological step;

familiar and unfamiliar, that is, an example of Freud’s unheimlich). Servants can act

like theatrical extras, ‘in and out of the drawing-room’ (to quote Woolf again),

233

Vita Sackville-West, The Heir (London: Hesperus Press, 1922 repr.2008) pp.21f

76

‘always going and coming’234

(to quote Edith Olivier). This gives them the

opportunity to interrupt and observe; to know the intimacies of the family without

revealing anything themselves: Olivier describes servants in her autobiography as

‘paid strangers’.235

The idea of servants reading in an ‘uncontrollable’ manner was part of Leavis’

anxiety about the proliferation of publishing, but their reading material could be a

source of fascination. Sylvia Townsend Warner admitted to William Maxwell that,

when she had a servant, she and Valentine Ackland would ‘count the hours till her

half-days & evenings out when we would rush into the kitchen and read her novels

and magazines: not quite up to the level of Mrs Henry Wood (she was too young for

that) but such a grateful change from Dostoevski.’236

While this viewpoint is not

prescriptive (and proscriptive) in the manner of Leavis, it is still a manifestation of

intellectual and social snobbery which places servants at a communicative distance.

Although some middlebrow protagonists shift between these roles (Laura Willowes’

self-sufficiency includes taking on many activities previously done by maids, for

instance) the structure of the archetypical middlebrow home maintained this distance

between spheres, even though it was evolving.

The evolving role, status, and number of servants are among many other interwar

anxieties threatening the emblem of the ideal middlebrow home (other anxieties will

be examined in closer detail in subsequent chapters.) While each household

234

Olivier, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley: Personal Memories p.69. The Brontës Went To Woolworths

also refers to dolls they can’t give personalities as ‘rather like the servants and governesses who come

and go; they won’t immortalise.’ [Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths p.18] 235

Olivier, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley: Personal Memories p.69 236

Warner, Maxwell, and Steinman, The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner &

William Maxwell p.146

77

recognised the limitations of their own attempts to match this exemplar, and some

(such as the Servant Problem) became discussable tropes of fiction and non-fiction,

the middlebrow fantasy of the unchanging ur-home was retained as a standard, even

while it was neither expected nor realisable. Aspirational replications of this elusive

standard are not, as Clarke writes, ‘escapist fantasy spaces conjured up to deal with

the limitations of the materiality of “real” homes, but rather are used as measures or as

proactive forces that intermittently meld with or mock the reality of lived

experience.’237

Behind each home lurked the ideal home (for it is an instance, again,

of the middlebrow paradoxical thirst for, and resistance to, homogeneity) as a

prototype or palimpsest – or, indeed, the ghost of an ideal home. While it could ‘meld

with or mock’, or haunt, the actual lived experiences of middlebrow families, it also

informs the codification of fictional middlebrow homes, and the point of departure for

their undermining. The disparity between this projected paradigm and experienced

reality lead to a wider interrogation of the ways in which reality could be undermined,

and made domestic space the perfect territory for explorations of the middlebrow

fantastic.

237

Clarke, 'The Aesthetics of Social Aspiration' p.27

78

Chapter Two

‘Adventures of the everyday are much the most interesting’238

:

Finding Room for the Domestic Fantastic

The domestic fantastic, to reiterate, is the variety of middlebrow novel which

maintains an emphasis upon matters of the (realistic and mimetic) home, but

introduces an element of the fantastical into this world. Erica Brown and Mary

Glover suggest that ‘during the 1920s this realism became persistently identified as

middlebrow’,239

and this was often the legacy inherited by authors in the interwar

period, from Walpole, Galsworthy, and other writers whom Storm Jameson described

as ‘half-legendary figures in [the] background’.240

Yet realism was beginning to be

recognised as one of the least valid ways of presenting reality, and (as a reviewer of

Lolly Willowes wrote)

Novelists are at last ceasing from trying to photograph life and beginning to

treat it as the greatest of our painters do – as a deep mystery which may be

approached from any angle except that of the photographer.241

The fantastic offered a means of finding this angle, stretching and reorganising the

everyday, particularly for those writers who would not privilege more avant-garde

approaches to literature. Yet approaches to the fantastic are not singular and

universal. The influential fantasy theorist Tzvetan Todorov, as shall be seen, tidies

away the nature of a non-fantastic existence with the single criterion that there be no

238

Sylvia Townsend Warner, interviewed in Louise Morgan, Writers at Work (London: Chatto &

Windus, 1931) p.31 239

Erica Brown and Mary Grover, 'Introduction' in Erica Brown and Mary Grover (eds.) Middlebrow

Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920-1960 (Palgrave Macmillan: Hampshire, 2012) 1-21,

p.8 240

Jameson, The Georgian Novel and Mr. Robinson p.3 241

S.P.B. Mais, ‘Fiction Makers Dipping Into the Past’, Daily Graphic (01/04/26), Chatto & Windus

Archive CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of Reading

79

‘devils, sylphides, or vampires’242

but although he uses the expression ‘our world’, as

a structuralist he adds that ‘we have in mind no actual reader, but the role of the

reader implicit in the text’.243

As such, his theory cannot encompass the nuances

brought to the fantastic novel when it is written for a certain section of the reading

public – in this case, the middlebrow, with their own particular identity and thus

version of reality, which necessitates various willing compromises, to ‘fit in’ the

fantastic.

Although the domestic fantastic questions, augments, and disturbs the middlebrow

novel, it cannot alter its fundamental tenets of identity; that which Jonathan Culler

terms ‘cultural vraisemblance’, or the ‘accepted knowledge which a work may use but

which do not enjoy the same privileged status as […those which] derive directly from

the structure of the world.’244

That is to say, they are not natural laws, but are still

anticipated as unspoken components of (a perception of) reality; what Elizabeth

Bowen termed a novel’s ‘pre-assumptions’.245

But where Culler assumes an universal

cultural intelligibility, it is more practicable to see different societal strata recognising

and identifying with different codes of cultural vraisemblance.

Certain elements of the middlebrow vraisemblance, which invite the mimetic

identification vital to the middlebrow reader, are not lost with the arrival of the

fantastic – contrary to Eric Rabkin’s suggestion that in a fantastic novel ‘the ground

242

Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre p.25 243

Ibid. p.31. It should be noted that Todorov borrows the concept of the ‘implied reader’ from

Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 1961) 244

Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) pp.140f 245

Elizabeth Bowen, Collected Impressions (London: Longmans, 1950) p.258, quoted in Beauman, A

Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-39 p.4

80

rules of the narrative world must be diametrically contradicted.’246

A diametric

contradiction (were that possible) would render the narrative incoherent and even

nonsensical, and the referential and symbiotic relationship between real and fantastic

stages of a domestic fantastic novel make the application of this definition particularly

untenable. Rabkin adds that ‘[i]f we know the world to which a reader escapes, then

we know the world from which he comes’,247

but in the middlebrow fantastic this

analytical procedure is unnecessary for two reasons. Firstly, each domestic fantastic

novel must start in the mould of the normative domestic novel, depicting a world akin

to the reader’s own, to be thwarted (or enhanced, or reconfigured) by the introduction

of the fantastic.248

Any fantastic narrative which posits a default reality distant from

the reader’s own alienates the reader and is received as a strange realm, even before

the fantastic is introduced. The familiar must be established to be defamiliarised.

Secondly, as stated, this ‘world from which he comes’ is never entirely absent, and

middlebrow vraisemblance is not lost. Instead, the fantastic must make concessions

to these markers of identity, particularly those which would appear to resist the

fantastic, chief among which are etiquette, commonsense, and (as has been

established) the home. The middlebrow ethos must make room for the fantastic, and

the fantastic must accommodate these vital aspects of the middlebrow.

246

Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature p.8. Perhaps he has in mind the psychoanalytical idea of the

unconscious representing a desired or feared object as its opposite. 247

Ibid. p.73 248

Even those novels which announce the fantastic on the first page introduce it into an otherwise

normative environment, and must delineate this by contrast with the change that is effected. Of course

a reader’s world and a fictive world cannot completely overlap. The inherent ‘falseness’ of fiction is

discussed by several fantasy theorists, including Todorov, who summarises Northrop Frye’s Anatomy

of Criticism, incorporating this paraphrase: ‘The literary text does not enter into a referential relation

with the “world,” as the sentences of everyday speech often do; it is not “representative” of anything

but itself.’ Todorov adds later ‘[b]y its very definition, literature bypasses the distinctions of the real

and the imaginary, of what is and of what is not.’ [Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a

Literary Genre p.10; p.167]. Yet this chasm does not fundamentally alter the dynamics of a reader’s

involvement and reception, which is the point under consideration.

81

Minding Ps & Qs: commonsense, etiquette, and inheriting the Gothic

The home is self-evidently important for the domestic fantastic, and the ideal home,

standing for familiarity, intimacy, and enclosure, is frequently the accepted basis as a

novel opens, and remains as a latent potential throughout all its disruptions. Even if

contemporary concerns proved the idealised household an unattainable myth, it

remains the fictive norm against which the strange is measured – but always a

vulnerable one, with a sense of latent disruption. As Farah Mendlesohn writes in

Rhetorics of Fantasy, at the outset of such novels there must be ‘simultaneously – the

construction of a sense of a protected space, one that cannot be ruptured, and a sense

that such a rupture is imminent.’249

In this, the domestic fantastic borrows from

Gothic fiction, but adapts this significant predecessor in order not to compromise

either a middlebrow resonance or the effects of the fantastic. The archetypical Gothic

house (or, often, castle) had become synonymous with the sinister, thus neutering the

effect of the unusual: strangeness was expected in the old, vast, crenulated homes of

the genre. The Gothic house needed, ironically, domesticating. As Glen Cavaliero

notes, the domestication of the exotic Gothic, ‘even while it diminishes the apparent

occasion for the onslaught of the unexpected, serves to localize it and thus to render it

more inescapable.’250

The strange and determinedly unfamiliar site of the castle may

come with narratively convenient trapdoors and tunnels, but the resolutely ordinary

home could afford none of these plot luxuries. Its familiarity is itself a cause of

enclosure.

249

Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy p.117. 250

Cavaliero, The Supernatural and English Fiction p.55

82

Mary Pendered’s popular 1927 novel The Uncanny House plays upon inherited

Gothic archetypes, and the consequent shock when the strange afflicts a normal house

rather than the exaggerated and subverted versions of home in Gothic fiction:

It was all nonsense, she told herself, about the house being haunted. It was a

nice, homely, commonplace sort of house; not a bit the kind in which any ghost

would disport itself; Like most of us, she visualized the haunted house as of the

Moated Grange type – a place where awful crimes had been committed.251

The prosaic home – that lived in by the ‘us’ Pendered uses to encompass the reader –

is, however, exactly that with which the domestic fantastic is most concerned. The

Gothic legacy in domestic fantastic novels leads to a conflation of rational, but

improbable, anxieties and those of a supernatural character. Virginia Woolf’s

Orlando, in the most multifaceted, though not middlebrow, of fantastic novels

(published in 1928 and documenting the life of a person who lives for centuries and

metamorphoses from a man into a woman) ‘became nervous lest there should be

robbers behind the wainscot and afraid, for the first time in her life, of ghosts in the

corridors.’252

The domestic fantastic is characterised by this meeting of natural

(robbers) and supernatural (ghosts) concerns.253

Yet often the fantastic occurrences

are not inherently supernatural, but the way they are manifested is. Agatha’s child in

The Love-Child, the fox of Lady into Fox, and the appearance of Miss Hargreaves do

not introduce anything akin to ‘devils, sylphides, or vampires’, but rather congruous

novelistic components in an incongruous manner. The normalised environment is

251

Mary Lucy Pendered, The Uncanny House (London: Hutchinson, 1927) pp.55f 252

Woolf, Orlando p.234 253

Rosemary Jackson writes that ‘the history of the survival of Gothic horror is one of progressive

internalization and recognition of fears as generated by the self.’ [Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of

Subversion p.24] This perceptive point goes slightly too far: the Gothic influence is not wholly

transmuted from an external to an internal anxiety. Rather the domestic fantastic usually focuses upon

the troubling dynamics of the internal self in relation to an external world.

83

fantastically disturbed and rearranged, rather than fundamentally altered in its

constituents.

Within this normalised space, commonsense is a valued and celebrated commodity.

While Leavis considered reality an anathema to the middlebrow,254

the Provincial

Lady demonstrates a privileging of the down-to-earth, often as a counterpart to more

grandiose ideas:

Life, declares Pamela, is very, very difficult, and she is perfectly certain that I

feel, as she does, that nothing in the world matters except Love. Stifle strong

inclination to reply that banking account, sound teeth and adequate servants

matter a great deal more.255

Delafield’s choice of practical elements in contrast to an ironically capitalised ‘Love’

is a reflection of her audience’s calm instinct for the prosaic and level-headed. The

same mantra occurs throughout middlebrow fiction and non-fiction; Marjorie Hillis’

solution to the ‘surplus women’ problem, for instance, is an ‘enormous fund of

common sense and cheerfulness’.256

It is precisely this insistence and reliance upon commonsense that presents an obstacle

for domestic fantastic novels to overcome. The Provincial Lady writes: ‘I have brief,

extraordinary hallucination of having returned to childish days of Robin and Vicky.

Cannot possibly afford to dwell on this illusion for even one second.’257

This step

254

Leavis writes of Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night that ‘[i]t is a vicious presentation because it is

popular and romantic while pretending to realism’, giving a peculiar dichotomy of ‘popular’ and

‘realism’. Conversely, Priestley viewed brutality and ‘a “face-the-unpleasant facts” snobbery’ as the

doctrine of the highbrow. [Leavis, 'The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers' p.338; Priestley, 'Brute Cult'

p.8] 255

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady Goes Further' , p.181. A contemporary review also notes her ‘irony

and commonsense’. [Helen Moran, 'Review of The Provincial Lady Goes Further' London Mercury,

XXVII (1932) 170-171, p170] 256

Hillis, Live Alone and Like It p.39 257

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in Wartime' p.456

84

into the ‘extraordinary’ is treated as a domestic foible, not to be indulged – whereas it

could conceivably be the premise for a domestic fantastic novel, and is indeed not

unlike that of Rachel Ferguson’s A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936). The fantastic is

seemingly antagonistic to commonsense, as exemplified by the use of the word

‘fantastic’ in the interwar period to mean something unlikely and even indecent, as (in

Macaulay’s Crewe Train) when a character committing adultery is said to ‘“behave in

such a fantastically improbable manner?”’258

‘Fantastically improbable’ appears to be

tautologous, and thus the word ‘fantastic’ must offer wider semantic significance than

simply the improbable, in the same way that Priestley refers to ‘grandly fantastic

Dickens’259

without intending to suggest that his plots or characters break natural

laws; the label is widened to indicate the unnatural or outlandish.260

When middlebrow reviewers turn their attention to the fantastic, they often consider

the subgenre less a new frontier than an authorial and readerly indulgence. Priestley

terms Lady Into Fox ‘a quiet little fantastic novel’, adding ‘I hope he will set to work

next time on an ampler theme’261

and, similarly, T. Earle Welby’s review of The

Love-Child states that

a brilliant future might be predicted for [Olivier] if it were not for the

consideration that the thing is a tour de force, and that it has yet to be

discovered what she can do when dealing with lives lived out soberly under the

light of the sun and not with a world of fantasy.262

258

Macaulay, Crewe Train p.218 259

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (London: William Heinemann, 1934) p.404 260

An image in Miss Hargreaves encapsulates two definitions of ‘fantastic’, when Norman’s sister and

mother discuss Miss Hargreaves’ unusual headwear: ‘“But, mother, it’s a fantastic hat!” / “Of course it

is. But Miss Hargreaves is a fantastic person.”’ [Frank Baker, Miss Hargreaves (London:

Bloomsbury, 1940 repr.2009) p.151] Jim intends social censure, and while her mother is not

intentionally referring to Miss Hargreaves’ nature (she is not real; she has been inadvertently created),

Baker allows the reader (who is aware) to interpret the word in that way. 261

J.B. Priestley, 'Review of Lady Into Fox' London Mercury, February (1923) 436-437, p.437 262

T. Earle Welby, 'Review of The Love-Child' The Saturday Review, 28/05/27 (1927) p.835 and

similarly, Olivier’s friend Mary Morrison wrote to her, on the publication of The Love-Child: ‘I am

immensely proud of your success & ever so keen for you to begin at once with another: a real story

85

His image of being away from ‘the light of the sun’, although perhaps suitable for

some instances of fantastic literature (including the subterranean world of ‘boundless

space’263

discovered in Herbert Read’s 1935 novel The Green Child) is scarcely

appropriate for the almost stultifyingly normal household in which The Love-Child

takes place.264

Middlebrow fantastic novels often atone for their fundamental compromise with the

prosaic and mimetic by acknowledging it. In The Love-Child: ‘the caustic drops of

Miss Marks’ common sense fell like a weed killer upon the one blossom of Agatha’s

imagination.’265

(The ‘blossom’ is Agatha’s imaginary friend Clarissa, before she is

accidentally brought to life.) This natural simile in a novel where the natural and

unnatural are so closely interwoven, resisting their traditional dichotomy, deepens the

threat commonsense could pose to the novel’s premise. Later Agatha recognises this

conflict:

It was quite impossible for her to tell anyone that Clarissa was nothing but a toy

child of her own making. Moreover, her own common sense told her that no

person with equal common sense would for a moment believe such a story.266

Olivier establishes the protagonist’s ‘own common sense’, whilst incorporating the

person of the reader (as someone ‘with equal common sense’) and their anticipated

scepticism. She predicts and determines her own reception, fusing implied and actual

readers, and thus helps the middlebrow audience overcome any sense of alienation

about people in the work a day world. I love your style, it just exactly suited your theme. But you can

go deeper next time & give us some of your innermost thoughts’. [Mary Morrison, 'Letter to Edith

Olivier' (31/05/27), Chippenham, Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Edith Olivier Papers 982/94] 263

Herbert Read, The Green Child (London: Capuchin Classics, 1935 repr.2010) p.161 264

Olivier’s own tale of an underground world, The Underground River, is often equally prosaic in

event, albeit depicting a literally dark space. [Edith Olivier, The Underground River (London;

Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1928)] 265

Olivier, The Love-Child p.14 266

Ibid. pp.49f

86

effected by the introduction of the fantastic. Welby, despite asking for a more ‘sober’

follow-up from Oliver, does also exemplify those reviewers who emphasise any

realistic content by praising her ‘matter-of-fact setting, and mak[ing] intelligent use of

the stolid servants, the blundering policeman, the uncomprehending neighbours.’267

These elements tie The Love-Child down securely to the constituents of everyday

middlebrow reality, and a commonsensical heroine hosts the fantastic.

Walter Scott, in one of the earliest English essays to treat the fantastic, 'On the

Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and Particularly on the Works of Ernest

Theodore William Hoffman’ [sic], labelled the ‘mode of writing’ as one

demonstrating ‘the most wild and unbounded licence’.268

He acknowledges only a

small collection of examples, including Frankenstein and Gulliver’s Travels, that

justify the supernatural:

In such cases the admission of the marvellous expressly resembles a sort of

entry-money paid at the door of a lecture-room, - it is a concession which must

be made to the author, and for which the reader is to receive value in moral

instruction.269

Scott’s concept of entrance to a lecture-room also prefigures MacCarthy’s spatial

metaphor and ethos of access to certain spheres – although in this case it is the author

seeking attendants, rather than the reader attempting to join a certain intellectual

267

Welby, 'Review of The Love-Child' p.835. Similarly, Frank Baker’s Miss Hargreaves is lauded for

being ‘as plausible as it is incredible’, and David Cecil’s introduction to a reprint of The Love-Child,

praises the ‘fantastic fairy-tale hypothesis, [being worked] out in accordance with the laws of sober,

everyday reality’. [Erica J. Royde-Smith, 'Willed But Unwanted' Times Literary Supplement, 26/10/40

(1940) p.545; David Cecil, 'Introduction' The Love-Child (London: The Richards Press, 1951) 3-8, p.3] 268

Scott, 'On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and Particularly on the Works of Ernest

Theodore William Hoffman' p.72. It is perhaps no coincidence that Hoffmann’s work was integral

both to one of the earliest articles about the fantastic and Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’, a central text on

the uncanny, which labelled Hoffmann the ‘unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature’. [Sigmund

Freud, 'The ‘Uncanny’ (1919)' in Albert Dickson (ed.) Art and Literature (Penguin Freud Library, 14;

London: Penguin, 1985) 339-376] 269

Scott, 'On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and Particularly on the Works of Ernest

Theodore William Hoffman' p.73

87

milieu. While ‘moral instruction’ is not the paramount concern for interwar novelists

that it was for Scott’s contemporaries, entertainment or self-examination takes its

place; the fantastic figures as an authorial indulgence which must be off-set with other

forms of gain.

Sylvia Townsend Warner uses a similar image in a 1929 lecture on ‘Mystery and

Fantasy’ (though it is not clear whether or not she intentionally echoes Scott, or even

E.M. Forster’s 1927 claim that the fantasist ‘asks us to pay something extra’):270

Since [the fantasist’s] main thesis surprises by itself, he must deny himself

further surprises…. The novelist not only may niggle away with small licences

all the time, he is a dull dog if he doesn’t. But the fantasist, having taken his

initial liberty, must mind his Ps and Qs for the rest of his adventure…. The

fantasist who has begun by asking for one vast initial credit must do on that

credit to the end.271

Rather than the wildness Scott saw in the 1820s, a century later the fantasist wishing

to use the remit of the domestic novel must exercise notable self-control.272

Warner’s

reference to ‘Ps and Qs’ brings the colloquial language of etiquette into play, and thus

demonstrates the ways in which the extant dynamics of middlebrow reality are

superimposed as a restraint upon the fantastic. That is, the fantastic lends some

licence to the middlebrow novel, but must not take licence with it. As a facet of this

interplay, the fantastic is often discussed through a framework of etiquette.

Condorex, in Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume, refers to Harriet’s telepathic powers as

270

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Pelican, 1927 repr.1962) p.113 271

Sylvia Townsend Warner, lecture at the City Literary Institute, October 21st 1929. Quoted in A.C.

Ward, The Nineteen-Twenties: Literature and Ideas in the Post-War Decade (London: Methuen, 1930)

p.132. (Ward’s ellipses.) A few years later, H.G. Wells writes similarly that there must be ‘a rigid

exclusion of other marvels from the story’ and that the author must ‘domesticate the impossible

hypothesis’. [H.G. Wells, Seven Famous Novels (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1934) p.viii] 272

A review of Miss Hargreaves notes likewise that ‘[t]he realm of fantasy is by some people

erroneously supposed to be free and untrammelled, but actually the fantastic story must conform to far

stricter rules [than most novels].’ [Royde-Smith, 'Willed But Unwanted' p.545]

88

‘your high occult kind of eavesdropping’,273

making the supernatural seem merely

inappropriate and even tawdry. (Telepathy offers another instance where the

Provincial Lady treats images of the fantastic as idle indulgences: ‘tr[y] to send silent

telepathic message to Cook that meat-pie will now not be enough, and she must do

something with eggs or cheese as first course.’274

) Similarly, The Love-Child

focalises through Agatha to muse that it is ‘terribly embarrassing not to know whether

they saw her as one person or as two.’275

Social awkwardness is privileged, as the

main focus of her dilemma, over wonder at the supernatural; crossing the boundary of

possibility parallels crossing the more flexible, but no less domestically significant,

thresholds of acceptable behaviour. But this breach serves to emphasise that etiquette

is not lost in a fantastic narrative, but instead shown more clearly by contrast.

The importance of etiquette, both in the writing of fantastic narratives and the

instances of the fantastic within these narratives, parallels the archetypically

middlebrow Provincial Lady and her determination to adhere to the unwritten rules

governing middle-class society. She constantly engages in self-questioning about the

‘correct’ way to live, almost in the manner of a Platonic dialogue and often enacted

through a series of ‘Queries’ in parenthesis. There are more than forty such queries in

the first volume alone, ranging from ‘Query: Does motherhood lead to cynicism?’ to

‘Is not silence frequently more efficacious than the utmost eloquence?’276

More

broadly, though twentieth-century middlebrow fiction resists a (purportedly)

Victorian model of the novel-as-instruction, its predilection for mimesis remains often

a form of interrogating ways in which to live. The Provincial Lady does not portray

273

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.57; West, Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy pp.184f 274

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady Goes Further' p.251 275

Olivier, The Love-Child p.40 276

Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.95; p.66

89

an ‘ideal life’, but rather a paradigmatic, self-reflective middlebrow life, in which Ps

and Qs are of vital importance for structuring relationships.

Etiquette is defined by a 1920s guide as ‘laws of conduct by observance of which

social intercourse can be maintained and prevented from degenerating into chaos’.277

While the fantastic is partly a response to the chaos of the unstable home, acting like

etiquette to attempt to stabilise and give structure to the uncontrollable, it almost

invariably brings its own chaos. Yet it is also an investigation of the limits of reality

and the (chaotic) problems in the readers’ real lives, acting from within to perform

this interrogation.

‘The duration of this uncertainty’: questioning the fantastic

This interrogation acts in both directions, of course. While the arrival of the

supernatural gives a new vantage to various aspects of real life (both in the narrative

and extradiegetically), the character affected by this arrival also engages in an

interpretive act of questioning the fantastic. The character may not try to rationalise

the supernatural incident, but they invariably (however briefly) compare it to the

rational, and investigate the discrepancies. This forms the central aspect of Todorov’s

definition of the fantastic, cited by almost every subsequent fantasy theorist:

In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils,

sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the

laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must

opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the

senses, or a product of the imagination – and the laws of the world then remain

what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of

reality – but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.

[…]

277

Ursula Mary Lyon, Etiquette: A Guide to Public and Social Life (London: Cassell & Co., 1927) p.1

90

The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one

answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the

uncanny or the marvellous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a

person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently

supernatural event.278

Todorov’s argument, though it is only intended to apply to an implied reader, sets a

precedent by delineating an encounter and elision between the ‘familiar world’ and

unfamiliar intrusion. His theory permits fantastic elements to be de-alienated and

recognises the coexistence of natural and supernatural elements within a narrative,

which is, of course, an essential model for the domestic fantastic.279

Todorov views

this state (the fantastic) of interrogating the supernatural as temporary within a novel,

existing only during the period of enquiry.

This period is often dramatised in domestic fantastic novels – for instance, in Miss

Hargreaves Norman enumerates all the possible explanations for Miss Hargreaves’

existence, from ‘escaped lunatic’ to the Freudian possibility that ‘I had actually met

her somewhere in the past and […] she’d slipped out of my subconscious mind.’280

In

other domestic fantastic novels, however, it is only a momentary indecision,

narratively sidelined; in The Love-Child Agatha wonders briefly about the servants

seeing her chase after Clarissa in the garden: ‘They would have thought her mad.

And would they be right or wrong?’281

Since the narrative is always in the third

person, this qualm is introduced through a version of free indirect discourse, but

remains on the outside of Agatha’s mind. Her self-questioning about her sanity

278

Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre p.25. Todorov’s ‘uncanny’ is

that which appears fantastic but has a rational explanation, and ‘marvellous’ that which has an

irrational explanation. It is worth noting that devils, vampires etc. can appear in a fantastic novel – but

as intrusions, not as part of the non-fantastic world. 279

Todorov slips up when he writes that ‘the superlative, the excessive will be the norm of the

fantastic.’ For a novel to be executed fantastically, the norm must remain the norm, for the superlative

and excessive to resist. [Ibid. p.93] 280

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.77 281

Olivier, The Love-Child p.28

91

becomes also an authorial questioning, and an invitation to the reader to participate in

the same enquiry. Yet it is not dwelt on, and is not a dominant apparatus for reading

the fantastic in this novel, either for the reader or for the character. According to

Todorov, once Norman settles upon an indisputably supernatural explanation, and

once Agatha has realised that she is not mad, their novels are ‘marvellous’ rather than

‘fantastic’.282

I follow the path of many theorists responding to Todorov, by disputing

the idea that supernatural novels are non-fantastic – and, indeed, I see those novels

which remain in a hesitative limbo as separate from my concept of the fantastic.283

His paradigm of hesitation – of the real and fantastic in dialogue seeking an

interpretation of each other – is useful, but not (I believe) practicable in defining the

parameters of the fantastic subgenre. It would, for instance, exclude Lady Into Fox

altogether, and include novels where hesitation is extended by imprecise writing, as

much as authorial intention.

Todorov’s theory has been the source of much debate and significant repudiation, as

well as developmental inquiry. To mention three, Harold Bloom writes casually: ‘I

pause here to cast off, with amiable simplicity, the theory of fantasy set forth by

Todorov.[…] [T]he reader who hesitates is lost and has lost that moment which is the

agnostic encounter of deep, strong reading.’284

(He invites, of course, the rejoinder

that agnosticism is simply a prolonged period of hesitation.) Christine Brooke-Rose’s

criticism of Todorov’s work points out that he appears to postulate theoretical genres,

282

This concept has precursors in psychological theory; Ernst Jentsch (in an essay which is the only

psychological precedent acknowledged in Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’) states ‘As long as the doubt as

to the nature of the perceived movement [of a supposed inanimate object] lasts, and with it the

obscurity of its cause, a feeling of terror persists in the person concerned.’ [Ernst Jentsch and Roy

Sellars (trans.), 'On the Psychology of the Uncanny' Angelaki, 2 (1906 (trans. 1996)) 7-15, p.11] 283

For example, Irwin disputes the idea that hesitation is necessary, writing that ‘[i]n successful fantasy

all is certainty and clarity’. [Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy p.55] 284

Harold Bloom, AGON: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982)

p.204

92

but in fact concentrates on historical genres, while Neil Cornwell subdivides

Todorov’s categories still further, splitting ‘marvellous’ into ‘What if?’, ‘Fairy story’,

and ‘Romance/fantasy’. The definition he gives to the first of these is more feasibly

stretched across ‘the fantastic’ altogether: ‘works set in what seems to pass for ‘our’

world, but with a single (or at least a small number of) element(s) of the manifestly

impossible.’285

Most usefully, Amaryll Chanady directly dismisses Todorov’s idea of hesitation,

suggesting the substitute ‘antinomy, or the simultaneous presence of two conflicting

codes in the text.’ 286

The fantastic novel, Chanady proposes, does not seek to resolve

this conflict, but rather the fantastic and mimetic co-exist without either dominating.

This model moves beyond Todorov’s contained moments (or periods) of hesitation to

incorporate the entirety of a work, both structurally and receptively. Lady into Fox,

for instance, ends with the vixen’s death in her husband’s arms:

Then at that moment there was a scream of despair heard by all the field that

had come up, which they declared afterwards was more like a woman’s voice

than a man’s. But yet there was no clear proof whether it was Mr. Tebrick or

his wife who had suddenly regained her voice.287

In these final pages the parallel codes of fantastic and mimetic, or natural and

supernatural, overlap in an audible sign. The scream – or, rather, the other characters’

reception of the scream – acts metaphorically for the codes of reception for the novel.

The overhearing neighbours cannot distinguish between the voices of Mr. and Mrs.

Tebrick (representing natural and fantastic respectively) nor do these voices

285

Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of

the Fantastic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) p.71; Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic:

From Gothic to Postmodernism p.40 286

Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy pp.11f 287

Garnett, Lady into Fox pp.90f

93

comfortably and conclusively elide. Ambiguity remains for both neighbours and

readers, with neither ‘code’ being eliminated, offering a more applicable model for

the domestic fantastic (even though this is not specifically the audience Chanady has

in mind.)

‘Slipping from waking into sleep’: turning points

While the fantastic is not permitted to replace the mimetic, only distort and interrogate

it, each novel of this subgenre is bisected by the introduction of the fantastic. Before

this point, the establishment of a norm makes (or should make) the first section of

each example the equivalent of other middlebrow novels – excepting any elements of

presentiment which reveal a fantastic latency. The initial appearance of the fantastic

acts as a pivot, though the moment at which each novel confesses its fantastic nature

varies significantly, in terms of narrative placement, and it is illuminating to examine

how various authors play with this point and their readers’ expectation of it. Lady

Into Fox announces the fantastic overtly, on the first page, with what Garnett would

later call ‘a bang of the drum in the first paragraph’:288

‘the sudden changing of Mrs.

Tebrick into a vixen is an established fact which we may attempt to account for as we

will.’289

Although there remains the possibility of an unreliable or duped narrator, the

fantastic is fairly securely established.290

Turning points can function either as pivot-as-event or pivot-as-framework. While

both necessitate a shifting from the domestic novel to the fantastic novel, only in the

former does the turning point feature as a momentous narrative event, as well as a

288

Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest p.246 289

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.1 290

Agatha Christie’s 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd had popularised the idea of the

unreliable narrator, making the trope accessible for a middlebrow audience.

94

marker of genre. The latter, which usually arrives early in the narrative, helps inform

an interpretation almost from the outset, and is less disruptive. So Lady Into Fox still

separates the fantastic and non-fantastic either side of a crux, but by introducing the

fantastic on the first page, this moment is incorporated almost immediately into the

reader’s receptive framework for interpreting and comprehending the novel. At the

other end of the spectrum, Lolly Willowes doesn’t concretely state the idea of

witchcraft or Satan for the first two-thirds of the novel; Warner relies more heavily

upon creating the basis of a domestic novel, before this is disrupted. When the

fantastic is eventually and emphatically introduced, as a pivot-as-event which distorts

the reading of the novel, it does so in language approaching the precision of a legal

document: ‘She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a

compact with the Devil.’291

However, despite being praised by Gillian Beer for the

‘intransigent clarity of her language’292

, Warner’s tone deliberately avoids clarity

here. Though purporting to be a simple, biographical statement, the sentence falters

through superfluous clauses and the precision of the statement melds with the

imprecision of its syntax.

Until this transition, as one reviewer notes, Lolly Willowes has ‘differed from other

stories of frustrated women’s lives only by the surety of its description and the purity

of its style.’293

Ward writes of Lolly Willowes that ‘[s]uch unobtrusive skill and art

have gone into the gradual preparation for the change that the passage from the one

state to the other is as smooth as slipping from waking into sleep’.294

(Sleep, as shall

be discussed in my conclusion, is a significant image of change running through

291

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.169 292

Beer, 'Sylvia Townsend Warner: "The Centrifugal Kick"' p.82 293

I.B. O’Malley, ‘Women and Witches’, Women’s Leader and Common Cause (26/2/26), Chatto &

Windus Archive CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of Reading 294

Ward, The Nineteen-Twenties: Literature and Ideas in the Post-War Decade p.135

95

domestic fantastic novels and, at least here, their criticism.) In this instance, however,

it is not solely preparation which makes the transition smooth, but a genuine

continuity. Warner (perhaps following the advice laid out in her ‘Mystery and

Fantasy’ lecture) exemplifies a common trait of the domestic fantastic by not radically

altering the tone, style, or pace used before the advent of the supernatural. There is a

clear, thematic continuation of ‘frustrated women’s lives’, and one commentator

wryly remarks that ‘the second half is almost more convincing than the first’.295

Edwin Muir considered it a ‘fundamental falsity’ that Warner

writes about occult things, but she gives them no significance other than she

gives to ordinary things. When Laura is a witch she is not essentially different

from what she was before the change happened.296

Yet this is, of course, precisely the intention of the domestic fantastic novel. The

supernatural is recognised as supernatural, but treated as an extension or manipulation

of the everyday. Similarly, the tone and nature of the fantastic intrusion may disrupt

domestic equilibrium, but need not be antagonistic to it. Walter Scott’s view was that

fantastic elements ‘ought to be rare, brief, indistinct, and such as may become a being

to us so incomprehensible and so different from ourselves’, adding that the worst

thing a supernatural creature can be is ‘as it is familiarly called, chatty’.297

This is

both a middlebrow attribute and a middlebrow censure – and yet domestic fantastic

novels act precisely against Scott’s dictum. The supernatural is not merely glimpsed,

but produced and incorporated wholly into the maelstrom of middlebrow life –

whether gradually or suddenly. In these novels the fantastic emerges and stays put –

or, to use the imaginative metaphor chosen by Ward, ‘they have taken the naked

295

Eleanor Perényi, 'The Good Witch of the West' New York Review of Books, 32/12 (1985) 27-30,

p.27 296

Edwin Muir, 'Review of Lolly Willowes' The Nation & The Athenaeum, 06/03/26 (1926) p.782 297

Scott, 'On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and Particularly on the Works of Ernest

Theodore William Hoffman' pp.62f

96

winged fairy and dressed him up in a morning-suit with spats before letting him loose

among twentieth-century people.’298

Many fantastic novels which do not open with the overtly fantastic do, though, play

with harbingers beforehand, preparing the reader for the fantastic and psychologising

them in advance. As part of Lolly Willowes’ status as a model of continuity, Orlo

Williams’ review notes that ‘[t]here have been hints, it is true, but too deep for the

unintuitive.’299

There is an early portent that she ‘might grow up eccentric’, and

further foreshadowing later, when Laura proposes her scheme for moving to Great

Mop to her brother:

[Henry] rallied Laura, supposing that when she lived at Great Mop she would

start hunting for catnip again, and become the village witch.

“How lovely!” said Laura.

Henry was satisfied. Obviously Laura could not be in earnest.300

Henry’s obtuseness and the irony of this final line (which is the strongest suggestion

yet that Laura could be in earnest) act as signposts towards the fantastic – yet this

excerpt would not be incongruous in that which Orlo Williams feared Lolly Willowes

would become: ‘one more study – though an unusually artistic one – of a frustrated

woman’s life and death.’301

(Williams’ silent allusion is presumably to May

Sinclair’s 1922 novel about spinsterhood, Life and Death of Harriett Frean.)

Incidentally, one of the reasons that that Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontës Went To

Woolworths hovers on the border between domestic fantastic and the simply surreal is

298

Ward, The Nineteen-Twenties: Literature and Ideas in the Post-War Decade p.132 299

Orlo Williams, 'Review of Lolly Willowes' Times Literary Supplement, 04/02/26 (1926) p.78 300

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.17; p.97 301

Williams, 'Review of Lolly Willowes' p.78

97

that it has no turning point, as such, and elements (such as the anthropomorphism of

their dog and doll) which could have figured as harbingers of the fantastic (the Brontë

sisters appear on their doorstep) have no basis of domestic reality with which to

contrast. Where Lolly Willowes demonstrably borrows from an extant branch of

middlebrow fiction, The Brontës Went To Woolworths deliberately divorces itself

from the ‘usual’ and stereotypical, as exemplified by the knowing, almost meta,

opening line: ‘How I loathe that kind of novel which is about a lot of sisters.’302

On

one level this is precisely what the novel is about, but by foregrounding a resistance to

this variety of literature, Ferguson’s separation of the novel from the mainstream is

self-fulfilling. Instead, Ferguson creates an exaggerated vision of what Humble terms

the ‘family as a profoundly eccentric organization’.303

The Carne family live in an

imaginative world of make-believe which carries across to the narrative, where there

is no linguistic division between fantastic and non-fantastic. Metaphor is destabilised

as there is no clear distinction in the novel between imagery and language intended to

establish fact:

I first saw and spoke to Lady Toddington two years ago, though I had known

her intimately for nearly three years.304

This sentence acts as a kind of zeugma, attaching the imaginary and the

(novelistically) factual to the same verbs. The novel does offer a skewed variant of a

distinction between real and fantastic, by including occasional chapters focalised

through the prosaic (and mystified) governess Miss Martin, and elsewhere Deirdre

(the narrator) comments of one flight of fancy: ‘That sort of tale we recognise as

302

Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths p.7 303

Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s p.149 304

Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths p.24

98

fantastic. We know how to be reasonable.’305

This line is unquantifiable, however,

and impracticable in determining the potentially fantastic elements of the novel.

Without the establishment of an assessable reality, there can be no fantastic, and

precursors have nothing to point towards.

Precursors often take the form of imagery or parenthetical comments which later in

the narrative becomes literal. For example, long before Judy metamorphoses into a

plant in Flower Phantoms, ‘[s]he felt like a tender shoot that has come up in the snow

and would have done better to stay underground.’306

(It is an intriguing simile, as

regards her eventual metamorphosis, suggesting a pessimistic vision of change from

the outset.) Olivia, in Bernadette Murphy’s time-travel novel An Unexpected Guest,

makes repeated throwaway comments about ‘how amusing it would be to go back to

the past as one is now’307

before precisely that occurs. These act as linguistic

presentiments, and, while there is still a single pivotal point between real and fantastic

in these narratives, these moments create a tonal harmony between the bisected

halves. The turning points are still pivot-as-event, because they fundamentally

change the way in which the characters are read and (by extension) their relationship

with the environments they inhabit, but there is some linguistic preparation. Olivier

reverses this conceit towards the end of The Love-Child, when David says to Clarissa:

“Clarissa, my love for you is all that I am now. I simply don’t exist except in

my thoughts of you, my love for you.”308

Whilst this metaphor is false romantic rhetoric on David’s part, it does describe

Clarissa’s dependence upon Agatha’s mind for her own existence – rather than

305

Ibid. p.94 306

Ronald Fraser, Flower Phantoms (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926) p.26 307

Bernadette Murphy, An Unexpected Guest (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934) p.43 308

Olivier, The Love-Child p.160

99

prefiguring the fantastic, it draws the image full circle, and exemplifies the

interpretive possibilities when language must determine both fantastic and non-

fantastic states and characters in the same novel.

These signposts do not solely act to prepare the path towards the intrusion of the

fantastic. Their function is also to tease the reader who is likely to have pre-existent

awareness of the novel’s fantastic nature. Todorov suggests that re-reading the

fantastic is a very different act from the initial reading, since ‘identification is no

longer possible, and the reading inevitably becomes a meta-reading, in the course of

which we note the methods of the fantastic instead of falling under its spell.’309

This

would be true only if the narratives existed in a receptive vacuum, since in one sense

every reading is a ‘meta-reading’. It is probable that readers would have

foreknowledge of the fantastic derived through advertisements, reviews, and

discussion with fellow readers – whether as word-of-mouth recommendations or

through the broader community of middlebrow readers in media such as the Book

Society newsletter. For example, the list of other novels published by Jonathan Cape

at the end of Rachel Ferguson’s A Harp in Lowndes Square advertises Ronald

Fraser’s Flower Phantoms as ‘a strange tale of a girl's merging into the body and

experience of a plant.’310

Ferguson’s novel, in turn, is both advertised and reviewed

in the April 1936 Book Society News, and described as ‘a strange, mysterious story

incorporating a time-theory in terms of a house’s atmosphere.’311

Prior awareness can

come from paratextual sources, as well as those outside the book: Lady Into Fox

announces its fantastic premise within the title – as do Ronald Fraser’s The Flying

Draper (1924) and Andre Maurois’ The Thought-Reading Machine (1938) – and there

309

Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre pp.89f 310

Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square [n.p.] 311

Anon., 'You May Also Like...' Book Society News, April (1936) p.16

100

is a subtle forewarning of Satan’s arrival in the subtitle of Lolly Willowes or The

Loving Huntsman. These novels offer paradigmatic instances of pivot-as-framework.

The level of reader awareness, and thus expectation of the fantastic, cannot be

deduced from the text alone (particularly for a middlebrow audience, with its own

industry for dialogical recommendation) and there is no single receptive model for

transitional moments in these narratives. Where there is the possibility of the fantastic

being foreseen from before the outset of the novel, and thus acting latently throughout

the normalised, realist opening section, authors can exploit the reader’s anticipation

by playing with false-starts. The fact that the novel can be categorised within the

subgenre of the domestic fantastic may not surprise the reader, but the placement of

the turning point might. For instance, the opening sentence of the second chapter of

The Love-Child, ‘Clarissa came back in the night’,312

which might be interpreted as

the moment where the fantastic is realised, is immediately attenuated by the

amendment that this appearance takes place only in Agatha’s dreams. The reader is

conceivably (and ironically) more surprised by the absence of the fantastic at this

point than by its arrival when Clarissa does appear later in the narrative.

The complicit reader and the style(s) of the fantastic

Rather than simply stretching the reader’s credulity, domestic fantastic novels invite

their complicity. Forster writes that when ‘reading The Ancient Mariner we forget

our astronomy and geography and daily ethics.’313

These are willingly suspended, not

passively forgotten. In the same way, engaging with fantastic novels, the reader

312

Olivier, The Love-Child p.19 313

E.M. Forster, 'Anonymity: An Enquiry (1925)' Two Cheers For Democracy (London: Edward

Arnold & Co., 1951b) 87-97, p.91

101

cannot dismiss his/her knowledge of natural laws and approach a narrative á la tabula

rasa. Instead, they are foregrounded through the reader’s complicit acceptance of

their fictive negation – and anticipation of this negation. By preparing to suspend

disbelief in this manner, the middlebrow reader permits identification with characters

experiencing the fantastic, and, because of sharing the same world, identification is

the primary readerly difference between the fantastic and Fantasy.

The concept of ‘credulity’ in relation to reading fiction is, of course, paradoxical – or

rather it reveals the different planes of ‘truth’ within a fictional text. The reader plays

a more complicit and active role in the sustenance of the fantastic than would be

suggested by a binary division of credulity and incredulity, as demonstrated through

contemporary reviews of fantastic novels. Gerald Gould’s response to Lady into Fox

exemplifies the manner in which impossible particulars are received:

To some narrow folk, Mr. Garnett’s story, despite its sober veracity, will seem

as improbable as the elaborate inventions of Mr. [E.C.] Vivian [the pseudonym

of Fantasy novelist Charles Cannell]; but not to those susceptible to the charms

of style. From beginning to end of ‘Lady Into Fox,’ there is not one false-note.

The coherence and harmony are absolute. To apply the vulgar and impertinent

test of probability is unthinkable.314

Gould’s words are, of course, ironic, instancing a willingness not only to be complicit

in the construction of the fantastic, but to adopt a tone which embraces the worldview

of the novel. The peculiarly middlebrow reprimand ‘vulgar and impertinent’

reinforces the idea of etiquette in fantastic writing and reception, and exemplifies the

partisanship which accompanies the formation of one complicit group of readers

against a presupposed set of ‘narrow folk’. Middlebrow readers are not duped by the

314

Gerald Gould, 'Review of Lady Into Fox' The Saturday Review, 27/01/23 (1923) p.116

102

presentiments of the fantastic into unknowingly accepting it, but instead cooperate

with the psychology required for pivotal narrative moments.

Although Irwin theorises about the dominance of ‘rhetoric’ in fantastic novels,

arguing that it needs to ‘persuade the reader through narrative that an invention

contrary to known or presumed fact is existentially valid’,315

it is important to

acknowledge the various planes of ‘persuasion’ which inform the response to a

fantastic fiction. Gould and his readers are obviously not swayed by the belief that a

lady could turn into a fox, but instead Gould intends to draw attention to narrative

‘cohesion and harmony’ as the establishment of a different variety of credulity: the

willing suspension of disbelief, or at least the suspension of vocalised disbelief.

Reviews of this nature demonstrate how flexible concepts of belief and truth must be

when actual (as opposed to implied) readers are considered, as these readers are

simultaneously aware of the real world, the fictively possible world, the fictively

impossible world, and their adopted role in observing all three. Agatha (in The Love-

Child) is in some ways the paradigmatic reader of the domestic fantastic, engaged in

the act of reading Clarissa’s appearance. She accepts the supernatural occurrence

with the reader’s same suspended incredulity, and is described as being

‘wholeheartedly in the game’,316

playing with Clarissa rather than performing an

ontological analysis. She is also responsible for Clarissa’s continuing presence – in

the same way that the collusive reader permits the successful continuation of the

narrative. Conversely, the reader who does not give credence to the fantastic – who is

one of the ‘narrow folk’ – kills its effect and its interrogation of the real.

315

Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy p.60 316

Olivier, The Love-Child p.27

103

The style chosen for fantastic narratives (when they do depart from the normalised

tone of the domestic novel, while remaining within a middlebrow remit)317

often

facilitates this balance of reader credulity and incredulity. These novels avoid an

internal interplay between belief and disbelief by adopting a style which does not

allow space for the misgivings of a narrator: a pseudo-biographical style. This may

seem antagonistic to the fantastic in the same way that middlebrow commonsense is,

but since it is the style of commonsense, as it were, it is a medium which, again,

atones for the fantastic events within the narrative. C.S. Lewis distinguishes between

‘realism of presentation’ and ‘realism of content’;318

for the faux-biographers, the

former (style) can ‘atone’ for the excesses of the latter (setting and plot).

Lady Into Fox is the quintessential domestic fantastic novel in this mode, seldom

straying from the straightforward – that which an early TLS review called the novel’s

‘extreme sobriety and exactness […] every circumstance of matter-of-fact detail’,319

in the same way that reviews of The Love-Child drew attention to the verisimilitude of

prosaic events. Desmond MacCarthy used the same term, writing that Garnett’s

‘invention is fantastic, but his imagination is matter-of-fact.’320

In this criticism,

MacCarthy praises Garnett’s peculiar simplicity as an observer and artist, but it is

fairer to say that the way in which Garnett translates his invention is matter-of-fact,

rather than the imagination which created it; the significance of Lady Into Fox runs

deeper than its surface, even though it is determinedly presented as being all surface.

This is made clear from the framing of the novel’s stark opening and the claim to

317

Glen Cavaliero writes of A Harp in Lowndes Square, it demonstrates ‘how a supernatural element

can be accommodated within what would otherwise be the characteristic naturalistic style of a light

novelist.’ This isn’t entirely accurate for Ferguson’s novel, but was an option for domestic fantastic

novelists. [Cavaliero, The Supernatural and English Fiction p.87] 318

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961) pp.57-9 319

Anon., 'Review of Lady Into Fox' Times Literary Supplement, 02/11/22 (1922) p.709 320

MacCarthy, Criticism p.226

104

‘confine myself to an exact narrative of the event and all that followed on it.’321

Garnett rarely incorporates introspection, and even passages which allude to emotions

outside the parameters of the matter-of-fact do so sparsely and at a distance: ‘by now

Mr. Tebrick had been through all the agonies of wounded self-esteem, disillusionment

and despair that a man can suffer.’322

The protestation of reality is seen in several domestic fantastic novels, possibly

influenced by the success of Lady Into Fox. Ronald Fraser’s The Flying Draper,

published little more than a year after Lady Into Fox, opens with the dictum ‘to write,

if possible, as if there were nothing strange about [the story]’,323

and, curiously late in

the narrative, Norman (the narrator of Miss Hargreaves) addresses the reader to

assure them ‘it is a very serious book […] [a]nd remember it’s true; I haven’t made a

thing up – except Miss Hargreaves in the first case.’324

(This breaking of the fourth

wall is not so postmodern a technique as it would be elsewhere, since the context of a

biographical tone permits such addresses.) These petitions for credulity rely again

upon the complicity of the reader and their awareness of genre, and, since the narrator

tends to be posited as another observer of the fantastic – a ‘reader’ of it themselves –

the author can present stark sentences rather than complex frames of justification.

Indeed, justification of this variety would belittle and compromise the contribution of

the reader in cooperating with the fantastic.

A second, longer review of Lady into Fox in the TLS writes:

321

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.1 322

Ibid. p.54 323

Ronald Fraser, The Flying Draper (Revised edn.; London: Jonathan Cape, 1924 repr.1931) p.19 324

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.76

105

That is one admitted way – to present fantasy as plainest fact. So, with dry

circumstances, Swift introduces Gulliver. Bluff, of course, is too crude a word

for the insinuating trick of it: but if there is no mystification there must be a sort

of lucid confusion, and Mr. Garnett has begun that with the flavour of his

words. They spread an eighteenth-century aroma, an atmosphere where all is

sensible and lucid; and if a freakish thing can really wear that manner it is half-

way to be a fact.325

‘Lucid’, used twice in this short excerpt, can apply both to sanity and

comprehensibility – the spectre of madness threads through many domestic fantastic

novels, but in Garnett’s novel it weaves alongside a purportedly truthful objectivity.

The impulse for authenticity seen in Gothic fiction, which frequently relied upon

framed narratives, discovered letters or manuscripts, and other concrete ‘proofs’,

persists into this strand of the domestic fantastic. Yet it is not the Gothic novel which

is referred to in McDowall’s review, but rather the grandiose eighteenth-century

novel. Several reviews of Lady Into Fox make comparisons with eighteenth-century

writers, but tend towards Defoe rather than Swift.326

Elinor Wylie plays upon the reputation of the eighteenth century for rationality by

setting The Venetian Glass Nephew in that period:

To those desiring to achieve a better comprehension of the character of Peter

Innocent Bon, cardinal priest and cardinal prefect of the Congregation of the

Propaganda, the historian recommends a careful study of his poetical writings

(Venice, 1790) and his notes upon liturgical subjects (Parma, 1794).327

325

A.S. McDowall, 'A Candid Fantasy' Times Literary Supplement, 22/02/23 (1923) p.121 326

Lynd, 'New Novels' p.1184; Woolf, 'Mr. Garnett's Second' p.115. When Warner wrote to Garnett,

saying she preferred A Man in the Zoo to Lady Into Fox, her reason was ‘because I like your writing

better than Defoe’s’ – although she was herself compared to both Defoe and Garnett by L.P. Hartley,

and other letters between them often mention Defoe with approval verging on veneration. [Warner,

Garnett, and Garnett, Sylvia and David: The Townsend Warner/Garnett Letters p.7; p.141; p.164; L.P.

Hartley, 'New Fiction' The Saturday Review, 06/02/26 (1926a) p.165] 327

Wylie, The Venetian Glass Nephew p.10.

106

Choosing the eighteenth century as her setting allows Wylie not only this pseudo-

historical stance, but permits more experimentation with style than would be

otherwise accepted by the reader: she can write in that which one reviewer labelled a

‘decorative and agreeable manner’328

without forfeiting the assumed sense of level-

headed authenticity. Bibliographical references are not the only pieces of

biographical paraphernalia and ‘evidence’ used by novelists who choose this style.

As with the photographs of Vita Sackville-West incorporated into Orlando, which

introduce multi-layering of realities and problematise any impenetrable division

between fantastic and real, Ray Garnett’s woodcuts in Lady into Fox are labelled

‘corroborative evidence’ by one reviewer.329

It is an extension of the diary format

(and variety of life-writing) which suggests veracity at the centre of the Provincial

Lady novels, even though these diaries are clearly not pieces of discovered evidence

(and nor, of course, are the woodcuts) – but rather apparatus for the invitation of

complicit credulity.

The first page of Lady Into Fox refers to the narrative being ‘so fully proved, and that

not by one witness but by a dozen, all respectable, and with no possibility of collusion

between them.’330

Garnett maintains this claim of authenticity to the final words of

the novel: ‘[he] lived to be a great age, for that matter he is still alive.’331

The first

half of this final sentence is congruent with a mythological tale; the discordant second

half pulls the tone away from fairy-tale, and extends to the reader a final token of

328

Edward Shanks, 'Fiction' London Mercury, May (1926) 91-93, p.92. On the other hand, L.P.

Hartley wrote that the novel was ‘virtually all decoration, a frame without a picture.' [L.P. Hartley,

'New Fiction' The Saturday Review, 24/04/26 (1926b) p.546] 329

Gould, 'Review of Lady Into Fox' p.116 330

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.1 331

Ibid. p.91

107

credibility. The jolt in the sentence reflects back upon the wider meeting of

mythology and authenticity within the domestic fantastic.

Woolf’s Orlando is famously subtitled ‘a biography’332

but (as with many other ways

in which this emphatically non-middlebrow novel incorporates myriad fantastic

techniques) her style is not simply the clinically biographical. This is shown as early

as the first line (‘He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the

time did something to disguise it – ’333

) wherein Woolf unsettles a traditional, David

Copperfield manner of opening a Bildungsroman by stilting a simple sentence with

ellipsis, and throwing the most basic biographical detail immediately into doubt – as

will, of course, become fundamental to the fantastic impetus of the novel. The same

shrouding of biographical tone in outlandish imagery and rich but obfuscatory

narrative is seen throughout Orlando, but particularly at Orlando’s transformation into

a woman. After a linguistically complex scene involving the appearance of the Lady

of Purity, the Lady of Chastity, and the Lady of Modesty, Woolf changes register to

state: ‘We have no choice left but confess – he was a woman’.334

Throughout Orlando Woolf plays with style and the ways in which it can mediate

communication by juxtaposing styles. A vague, anecdotal statement is instantly

transformed into biographical specificity (‘One June morning – it was Saturday the

18th

[…]’335

) or the same sentiment is expressed twice, in opposing styles:

332

Woolf was uneasy with the pragmatics of this decision, complaining that ‘it will have to go to the

Biography shelf. I doubt therefore we shall do more than cover expenses’. [Virginia Woolf, The Diary

of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3 (1925-30), ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Penguin, 1980 repr.1982)

p.198] Genres were not then so stratified as they have become, but the division between fiction and

non-fiction already had, as Woolf notes, a spatial impact in a commercial environment. 333

Woolf, Orlando p.13 334

Ibid. p.132 335

Ibid. p.64

108

Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it

rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses

daily or we could not go on with the business of living?336

An overly-poetical sentence is followed by one in a mundane, almost sardonic

register, yet they have essentially identical meanings. Woolf demonstrates that facts

are not neutral, but instead influenced by stylistic choices, and thereby exemplifies

two common approaches for domestic fantastic fiction.

For, those domestic fantastic novels which are not framed either through the matter-

of-fact faux-biographical or a recognisably domestic tone often chose what Angela

Carter labelled an ‘ornate, unnatural’,337

imagery-focused style closer to that which

Greer Gilman calls a ‘a high Baroque frenzy’.338

Kathryn Hume writes that

Fantasy allows a dream-like overdetermination and condensation. The language

of science (and, by extension, of realism) can achieve no such effect, for its

whole thrust is to rely on a technical vocabulary in which a word stands for one

universally acknowledged referent and no more. It aims to be unambiguous.

Fantasy instead aims for richness, and often achieves a plethora of meanings.339

Hume overlooks the possibility of presenting supernatural events in unambiguous

language, creating meanings that are not unstable but simply impossible. As Chanady

writes, fantastic novels have ‘the simultaneous presence of two conflicting codes in

the text. Since neither can be accepted in the presence of the other, the apparently

336

Ibid. p.65 337

Angela Carter, cited in Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, 'The Other Side of the Looking-Glass: Woman's

Fantasy Writing and Woolf's Orlando' Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, 1 (1993) 137-153,

p.143 338

Greer Gilman, 'The Languages of the Fantastic' in Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James (eds.) The

Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 134-

146, p.138 339

Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature p.194

109

supernatural phenomenon remains inexplicable.’340

The codes conflict and co-exist,

but they do not necessarily result or resolve in overdetermination.

Some middlebrow fantastic authors do, however, aim at a presentation of the

linguistic encapsulation of overdetermination which Hume seems to promote. It is in

these attempts, it must be confessed, that some weaker domestic fantastic writers

create the sub-Woolfean imitations wrongly considered almost universally

middlebrow by Q.D. Leavis. Fraser’s Flower Phantoms, for instance, opts for hazy,

abstract images to attain a fantastic style, which partly clouds a translatable depiction

of the fantastic: ‘“When I am in that universe bounded by tinted glass, in an ether

magical with light, warmth, my critical wits leave me.”’341

Wiser writers of this

subgenre recognise that, having taken liberties with fantastic events, they ought to

remain within the remit of middlebrow stylistic parameters. (The attempt to create a

fantastic language by looking outside the normative, rather than finding a method of

representation within it, is more characteristic of post-war Fantasy novels. Even aside

from Tolkien and his invented languages, there develops a tradition for archaic,

elaborate registers for depicting worlds separate from the reader’s own.)342

For middlebrow writers wishing to investigate the richness of language without losing

coherence or ending up as flawed imitations of avant-garde styles, a variation of (and

framework for) a fantastic style was provided by the popularisation of Freudianism

340

Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy p.12 341

Fraser, Flower Phantoms p.34 342

Greer Gilman describes how Fantasy literature uses (amongst others) hieratic, archaic, ecstatic,

ironic, absurd, demotic language. [Gilman, 'The Languages of the Fantastic' p.140]. In the ironic

category she includes David Garnett’s and Elinor Wylie’s ‘elegant and unbedizened prose’. (p.140)

Although Gilman makes no distinction between Fantasy and fantastic in this essay, her category of

ironic style is notably different from the others, and the only one with a common non-fantastic

counterpart.

110

and its semantics. Although middlebrow readers and writers were usually

unconvinced by the theories of Freud and his proponents, which were first translated

into English in 1910 and available in many popular guides from the end of that decade

– even the Provincial Lady has ‘serious thoughts of [writing an] interesting article for

any publication specialising in Psychology Made Easy’343

– his writings certainly

influenced the thinking and received wisdom of middlebrow society in the interwar

years, and the framing of certain fantastic narratives is helpfully informed by an

examination of the ways in which a middlebrow audience received and used

Freudianism. Todorov claims erroneously that ‘psychoanalysis has replaced (and

thereby has made useless) the literature of the fantastic’.344

Rather, the advent of

psychoanalysis may appear to have usurped the functions of the fantastic, but the

latter is equally equipped to borrow from the former.

‘The Oedipus complex was a household word, the incest motive a commonplace

of tea-time chat’:345

the middlebrow Freud and the fantastic language of

psychoanalysis

In 1917 Dorothy Scarborough could still write that ‘Freud’s theory of dreams as the

invariable result of past experiences or unconscious desires has not been stressed in

fiction, though doubtless it will have its inning presently.’346

Its innings certainly

came. Although Freudian semantics are not quite ubiquitous in the interwar period, it

is almost rarer to read a middlebrow novel from these decades which does not allude

at least briefly to Freudianism than one that does, and the topic is paramount in novels

such as Rose Macaulay’s Dangerous Ages and Delafield’s The Way Things Are.

343

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in Wartime' p.492 344

Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre p.160 345

D.H. Lawrence, 'Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1923)' Fantasia of the Unconscious and

Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (London: Heinemann, 1961) 197-249, p.197 346

Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (New York; London,: G.P.

Putnam's Sons, 1917) p.79

111

John Forrester describes Freud as a ‘transdiscursive’347

figure, acting as a symbol

outside and beyond his own published corpus. For middlebrow readers, Freud was

barely ‘discursive’ at all, side-stepping encounter with the written text to have Freud

(in the famous words of Auden’s ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’) ‘no more a person /

now but a whole climate of opinion’.348

Forster writes similarly:

Man is beginning to understand himself better and to explore his own

contradictions. This exploration is conveniently connected with the awful name

of Freud, but it is not so much in Freud as in the air.349

It is not evident for whose ‘convenience’ this connection occurs, nor does Forster

make clear specifically why he considers Freud’s name to be ‘awful’,350

but it is

noteworthy that any name – in itself, necessarily neutral – could become burdened

with sufficient significance to warrant the censure. Middlebrow novelists play upon

the unusual nature and foreignness of the name (it appears as ‘Frood’ in Rose

Macaulay’s Keeping Up Appearances, where a character disparages his ‘pretty nasty

book’351

), which helped concretise Freud’s status to most as a permeative name, rather

than an individual figure.

The topic of psychoanalysis spread quickly to a wide audience – ‘any thinking literate

person’,352

according to a 1945 work by Frederick Hoffman – appealing as a

347

John Forrester, '"A Whole Climate of Opinion": Rewriting the History of Psychoanalysis' in Mark S.

Micale and Roy Porter (eds.) Discovering the History of Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1994) 174-190, p.180 348

W.H. Auden, 'In Memory of Sigmund Freud (1939)' in Hendrik Ruitenbeek (ed.) Freud As We

Knew Him (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1973) p.116 349

E.M. Forster, 'English Prose between 1918 and 1939 (1944)' Two Cheers For Democracy (London:

Edward Arnold & Co., 1951a) 280-291, p.282 350

Even Auden’s poem is not wholly complimentary about Freud’s impact; less frequently quoted lines

include ‘He wasn’t clever at all’, and those immediately preceding the famous excerpt; ‘often he was

wrong and, at times, absurd’. [Auden, 'In Memory of Sigmund Freud (1939)' p.180] 351

Macaulay, Keeping Up Appearances p.139 352

Frederick John Hoffman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind (New York: Grove Press, 1945) p.70.

It is unclear whether he would include a middlebrow audience amongst this number; they, in turn,

112

conversation-topic if not a lifestyle overhaul.353

This was particularly true (as it is

today) with a selective emphasis within his work, focusing upon those aspects which

concern sex. A 1921 Saturday Review claims that psychoanalysis ‘wallows in sex’,

while in a 1931 London Quarterly Review, E.S. Waterhouse notes that ‘Freud’s

unrestrained emphasis on sex was an offence to the traditional British reticence on

such topics.’354

Yet it was largely the audience that chose to focus on these elements,

even in satire, enjoying the cryptic nature of the sex complexes Freud named – in

Miss Hargreaves, for instance, Norman consults the (fictitious) psychoanalytic book

The New and the Old Self by Dr. Birinus Hals-Gruber and notes that there was ‘a lot

about the Sesame Impulse and the Agamemnon-Reflex’,355

while the TLS asks, in a

review of Macaulay’s Dangerous Ages, ‘what will the psycho-analysts say to the

delicious fun she pokes at them? Her levity, we fear, will strike them as the sign of an

abominable complex.’356

In concentrating on Freud’s theories about sex, middlebrow readers choose the

element both most inherently domestic and least acceptable to discuss within the

certainly found the idea of lower-class familiarity with Freud amusing. Mrs. Miniver, for instance,

includes a ‘comic’ passage where taxi-drivers with the supposed stigmata of their class (‘a bottle nose’

and ‘a rheumy eye’) say ‘“They say it's all a question of your subconscious mind.”’ [Jan Struther, Mrs.

Miniver (London: Chatto & Windus, 1939) p.86] 353

For example, a 1915 American article ‘Speaking of Psycho-Analysis’ has the subtitle ‘The New

Boon for Dinner Table Conversationalists.’ [Floyd Dell, 'Speaking of Psycho-Analysis' Vanity Fair, 5

(1915) p.53] 354

Anon., 'Psycho-Analysis a la Mode' The Saturday Review, 12/02/21 (1921) 129-130, p.129; E.S.

Waterhouse, 'Psycho-Analysis: a Success or a Failure?' London Quarterly Review, January (1931) 27-

38, p.27. To be just to the middlebrow, higher echelons appear to have had the same focus: most of the

‘Short Communications’ in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis are about the castration

complex – with topics as unlikely as the shingling of hair attributed to this neurosis. [M.D. Eder, 'A

Note on Shingling' The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 6/3 (1925) 325-326] 355

Baker, Miss Hargreaves pp.167f 356

Orlo Williams, 'Review of Dangerous Ages' Times Literary Supplement, 02/06/21 (1921) p.352. It

should be noted that mockery of psychoanalysis was also not solely a middlebrow activity – it was

performed both in private and print by the highbrow milieu. Lytton Strachey’s 1914 farce According to

Freud is an early send-up of psychoanalysis’ adherents, while a 1924 letter from Virginia Woolf talks

of the ‘gull-like imbecility’ of Freudians. [Lytton Strachey, 'According to Freud (1914)' in Paul Levy

(ed.) The Really Interesting Question and Other Papers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972) 112-

120; Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3 (1923-1928) pp.134f]

113

home. Like the fantastic, Freud’s theorising of sexuality is seen as a breach of

etiquette – and repression, in the eyes of many middlebrow commentators, is nothing

more than the veneer of good manners.357

Freudianism upsets the Ps and Qs of the

middlebrow. It was not, however, solely Freud’s teachings about sexual complexes

that threatened to unravel the constructions used to prevent disorder and chaos in the

home; the central tenet of the unconscious acted in the same manner. While more

than one commentator opined that ‘commonsense’ disproved Freudianism,358

and the

two most common words 1920s middlebrow reviewers used against these theories

were ‘extravagant’ and ‘exaggerated’,359

Freudianism was nevertheless insidiously

unsettling to a sense of observable and controllable order. Like the fantastic, it

fulfilled a role that the Gothic had for earlier generations, by questioning the security

and invulnerability of the home – but going further and transcending the spatial and

physical, into the intangible and thus wholly inescapable. The idea that one’s desires

and impulses might be unknown to oneself, and that similar unpredictable

predicaments existed in one’s household (however much these views were satirised or

dismissed), was partly responsible for the middlebrow dilemma of the unstable home.

The fantastic was used to respond to Freudianism as it was used to respond to other

societal and domestic misgivings – that is, a controlled disruption of reality, to

interrogate other, uncontrollable disruptions of that reality. Yet Freudianism

contributes both to the anxiety and the response, by offering a language with which to

357

The Provincial Lady cynically notes that ‘the deliberate stifling of any impulse’ and the

‘encouragement of [an] unhallowed impulse’ are equally perilous, echoing Rose Macaulay’s more

solemn point that ‘[r]epression is damned, but unrepression is more damned’. [Delafield, 'The

Provincial Lady Goes Further' pp.161f; Rose Macaulay, Staying With Relations (London: Collins, 1930

repr.1969) p.215]. 358

Anon., 'Psycho-Analysis a la Mode' p.130; Henry J. Watt, The Common Sense of Dreams

(Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1929) p.xv. 359

Dean Rapp, 'The Reception of Freud By the British Press: General Interest and Literary Magazines

1920-1925' Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, 24/April (1988) 191-201, p.195

114

describe the idea of non-surface reality and thus paradigms and a language for the

fantastic; T.E. Apter even suggests that psychoanalytic theories ought themselves to

be read as fantastic literature.360

The importance of boundaries and parameters

(between reality and fantasy) in fantastic novels is reflected in the foregrounding

Freudianism gives to an approachable line between phenomenal reality and deeper

psychological reality – and a catalogue of instances can be collected of domestic and

spatial metaphors in psychoanalytic discourse. (As well as Jung’s lengthier treatise

on the psyche as a house, Barbara Low, author of the popular 1920 guide Psycho-

Analysis, states that Freud’s work is ‘the provision of new keys by which we can now

unlock doors in the human personality hitherto impassable, through which doors we

may pass into areas formerly unguessed at’.361

Freud himself writes in the first issue

of International Journal of Psycho-Analysis that ‘the Ego is not master in its own

house’,362

and his essay Das Unheimliche itself, of course, uses the ‘unhomely’ to

depict the unsettling and strange.)

This practice find its reflection in the way middlebrow fantastic writers use

Freudianism; not performing psychoanalytic readings, but rather borrowing the

language of psychoanalysis. Where images of the home were used to delineate

psychoanalytic theory, in turn the language of psychoanalysis was used to depict

dynamics of the home, and the fantastic events taking place therein. The amused or

concerned dismissal of many of Freud’s theories was accompanied by an increasing

pervasiveness of the terminology he used – for instance, in the first three Provincial

360

Apter, Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality p.6 361

Barbara Low, Psycho-Analysis: A Brief Account of the Freudian Theory (London: George Allen &

Unwin, 1920) pp.16f 362

Sigmund Freud, 'One of the Difficulties of Psycho-Analysis' The International Journal of Psycho-

Analysis, 1/1 (1920) 17-23, p.23

115

Lady novels, published in 1930, 1932, and 1934 respectively, the term ‘inferiority

complex’ is used:

(Query: Is not the inferiority complex, about which so much is written and

spoken, nowadays shifting from the child to the parent?)363

[Emma] adds that we ought to get on well together, as we have identical

inferiority complexes. Red-haired lady and I look at one another with mutual

hatred[.]364

Just as inferiority complex threatens to overwhelm me altogether[…]365

When the Provincial Lady initially introduces the term, it requires the distancing

context of being a foreign concept to the middlebrow home, however widely

discussed (in 1928, in Rose Macaulay’s Keeping Up Appearances, it is not yet even

expressed as a collocative two-word concept, but instead ‘that complex which is

called inferiority’.366

) In the second Provincial Lady book, Freudianism is depicted as

a lens through which to see social interaction, but is evidently still lexis from a foreign

discourse as yet not embraced by (or anaesthetised for) the Provincial Lady – which,

by 1934, it had been. The term is no longer given any fanfare, but is simply

incorporated into the narrative, unannounced. This microcosm of psychoanalytic

linguistic change reflects middlebrow society’s gradual incorporation of Freudian

semantics.

Domestic fantastic novels do sometimes incorporate psychoanalytic language non-

metaphorically – a character in Bernadette Murphy’s An Unexpected Guest remarks

that her life has ‘not even one interesting complex’, and in The Love-Child David

describes Agatha’s relationship with Clarissa with the words ‘something uncanny in

363

Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.38 364

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady Goes Further' p.226 365

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in America' p.291 366

Macaulay, Keeping Up Appearances p.19

116

her power’367

– yet Freudianism and the fantastic rarely overtly coincide within the

same novel. Humbert Wolfe, in a 1927 Vogue, even describes fantastic novels as ‘the

flight from Freud’.368

They offer parallel, if not wholly equivalent, methods of

presenting unreality: they inform one another, and overlap, yet would appear almost

tautologous if they co-existed (although reviewers were not always so scrupulous in

this division).369

Instead, the less jargonistic elements of Freudianism are used

metaphorically to describe moments of the fantastic, or approaches to it. When trying

to recall Clarissa in The Love-Child, Agatha describes the action being ‘on the

threshold of her mind, on the doorstep, so real, and yet just out of reach.’370

This

example is emblematic of the covert influence Freudianism has on this stylistic

approach to the fantastic, in its elision of psychological terminology and domestic

space. The idea of the mind having boundaries – and, more than that, violable

boundaries – is indebted to Freud’s work, but also indicates the distance which had,

by 1927, already been travelled from firsthand experience of his writing to thirdhand

use of its principles.

An association between Freudianism and modernist techniques such as free indirect

discourse and stream-of-consciousness (founded as they are in the idea of the

permeable mind) has long been identified, and even in Nicola Beauman’s avowedly

367

Murphy, An Unexpected Guest pp.11f; Olivier, The Love-Child p.151. Other casual references can

be seen in A Harp in Lowndes Square (‘G.P.s probably didn’t accept Freud, and indeed he must be an

unprofitable line, compared with pills’) and Flower Phantoms, after the first floral metamorphosis

where Judy ‘decided, on an empty stomach, to see a psycho-analyst. It was obvious, however, what

any psycho-analyst would say.’ [Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square pp.148f; Fraser, Flower

Phantoms p.81]. Ferguson and Fraser respectively draw attention to the mercenary and somatic

qualities of Freudianism, undermining its perceptive or scientific qualities while simultaneously

begging greater credulity from their readers. 368

Humbert Wolfe, 'The Growth of Fantasy in the Novel' Vogue, Late July (1927) 45, 68, p.45 369

For example, Marjorie Cook writes of The Love-Child that the ‘lover of allegory and the disciple of

Freud alike will find much to dispute in this fresh and spirited fable’. [Marjorie Grant Cook, 'Review of

The Love-Child' Times Literary Supplement, 26/05/27 (1927) p.372] 370

Olivier, The Love-Child p.16

117

middlebrow study A Very Great Profession the chapter on psychoanalysis is

concerned mostly with the ways in which middlebrow writers use (in Irwin’s words)

‘explorations of the psyche in its apparently inchoate wanderings.’371

Yet, though

they could adopt and adapt these stylistic decisions, excerpts like that quoted above

from The Love-Child exemplify a more middlebrow approach to a Freud-influenced

style.

While the conscious and unconscious are equally factual entities for the true Freudian,

middlebrow writers often transferred these concepts to reflect the planes of reality and

unreality. Novelists can borrow from the scientists’ semantic store, without the same

strictures of scholastic responsibility. Throughout the stages of the portent, process,

and concealment of the fantastic, The Love-Child frequently returns to the idea of the

unconscious: the initial memory of Clarissa ‘shot across [Agatha’s] consciousness,

like something suddenly alive’. Later, when Agatha must find an excuse for

Clarissa’s fantastic presence: ‘“A love child.” The phrase had surged up from her

inner consciousness’.372

While The Love-Child resists a psychoanalytic reading, since

it would be too simplistic to see Clarissa merely as the result of sublimation, Freud’s

influence is evident in the treatment of the fantastic and, as will be seen in my fourth

chapter, the ways in which this creation narrative builds upon the model of

Frankenstein.

Falling between the clinically biographical and the elaborately ornate, the choice of a

semantics influenced by psychoanalysis (which is not, of course, the same as a

371

Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy p.35 372

Olivier, The Love-Child p.13; p.68. Similarly, in An Unexpected Guest, time-travel is first hinted at

with the words ‘something struggled up from the depths of her unconsciousness’. [Murphy, An

Unexpected Guest p.244]

118

psychoanalytic novel) offers a fantastic style which, perhaps unwittingly,

acknowledged the ways in which Freudianism had opened the door for domestic

fantastic literature – not just as an anxiety to which to respond, but a framework

through which to do so. Fantasy theorists who have considered psychoanalytic

readings of the fantastic (Rosemary Jackson, for instance, states that ‘[f]antasy in

literature deals so blatantly and repeatedly with unconscious material that it seems

rather absurd to try to understand its significance without some reference to

psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic readings of texts’373

) have not allowed room for

those who would use the language of Freud without considering themselves

Freudians. Once more, concessions must be made instead to the commonsensical

middlebrow identity. Todorov writes that ‘the themes of fantastic literature have

become, literally, the very themes of the psychological investigations of the last fifty

years’,374

but the association worked in both directions, and these ‘investigations’

gave access to discussions and portrayals of disrupted reality and layers of reality

essential to the construction of a domestic fantastic novel and its continual

interrogation of the everyday.

373

Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion p.6 374

Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre p.161

119

Chapter Three

‘My Vixen’: Marriage and Metamorphosis

Insofar as it is possible to posit an individual novel as the originator of an interwar

fashion for the domestic fantastic, Lady Into Fox is that novel. It was published in

1922 to both critical praise and popular appeal, occupying (as discussed in my

introduction) both sides of the permeable boundary between highbrow and

middlebrow. H.G. Wells wrote of David Garnett’s ninety page novel:

It is quite a fresh thing. It is as astonishing and it is as entirely right and

consistent as a new creation, a sort of new animal, let us say, suddenly running

about in the world.375

Wells chooses his language aptly, suggesting that Garnett is responsible for a new

genus (and thus genre) or species of novel, reflecting (of course) the animal-focus of

Lady Into Fox (which, I will argue, was in part a codified way of discussing modern

marriage). It is appropriate, then, that the form of the fantastic which Garnett chooses

is metamorphosis, for he transformed and updated the ways in which the fantastic

could be used for a middlebrow audience: one reviewer stated that the publication of

Lady Into Fox as ‘mark[ed] a revival of the genuinely fantastic as legitimate thematic

material for the literary artist.’376

The fantastic as ‘thematic material’ suggests a turn

from figurative and abstract uses of fantasy towards the scenic and concrete, and a

definite sense that the fantastic novel as a whole is invested with this choice of

subgenre, rather than being viewed as an isolated impulse within a narrative. This

reviewer introduces the idea of culture legitimacy in a manner akin to Bourdieusian

theory – but since the Weekly Dispatch cannot be considered a highbrow paper, the

375

H.G. Wells, 'Modern Reviewing' The Adelphi, 1/2 (1923) 150-151, p.150 376

‘A Modern Fabulist’, Weekly Dispatch (05/08/23), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/25 (Press

Cuttings vol.23, 1922), University of Reading.

120

words ‘literary artist’ here encompass a wider remit than they might elsewhere.

Garnett is seen as taking the fantastic from a niche, unsophisticated market (perhaps

short stories in lowbrow magazines) and creating a legitimate precedent for

middlebrow authors to follow.377

Garnett did not influence only those novels of metamorphosis and animalised spouses

in the period (such as Flower Phantoms, John Collier’s His Monkey Wife, and

Garnett’s own A Man in the Zoo), but acted more widely as a benchmark for the

domestic fantastic of the 1920s and 1930s. Where Lady Into Fox’s reviewers

identified a deliberate stylistic affinity with Defoe and other eighteenth-century

writers, Garnett himself became the go-to point of comparison for later interwar

fantastic novelists; Lolly Willowes is described as ‘Lady Into Witch’ by three

reviewers, and ‘the first of his [Garnett’s] school to come to notice’ – a school to

which Edith Olivier was also inducted by a reviewer.378

Frank Baker even obliquely

refers to it in Miss Hargreaves when the heroine becomes a swan: ‘Hargreaves into

377

Comparisons with Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis are inevitable, but this 1915 work was not

translated into English until 1937, and Garnett could not read German – nor would many middlebrow

British readers have had access to Metamorphosis, so Lady Into Fox remains their precedent for

metamorphosis fiction. When it was suggested to Kafka, by his friend Gustav Janouch, that Garnett

had plagiarised his idea, he replied: ‘But no! He did not get that from me. It is a matter of the age. We

both copied from that.’ [Gustav Janouch, Conversations With Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees (London:

Andre Deutsch, 1971) p.22, quoted in Ardon Lyon, 'On Remaining the Same Person' Philosophy,

55/212 (1980) 167-182, p.182] 378

Hartley, 'New Fiction' p.165; ‘Lady Into Witch’, Liverpool Post and Mercury (3/2/26); V.C. C-B,

Cambridge Review (04/06/26), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926),

University of Reading; ‘G.E.G’, ‘Lollypops’, Granta (12/2/26), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/34

(Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of Reading; Anon., 'Picaresque Crichton' Time, 16/4 (1930b)

57. Olivier also notes, in diary, that Henry Newbolt tells her ‘You will be compared with David

Garnett, but you mustn’t mind that, for good as he is, you are far better’. [Edith Olivier, 'Diary

(December 1925 - December 1927)' Chippenham, Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Edith Olivier

papers 982/57 (14/05/27).] Similarly, Olivier writes in her diary earlier that ‘Secker is the one who

read my book & he was most optimistic about it & says it will be a success & likes it much better than

“Lady into Fox”.’ While Garnett praised The Love-Child, commenting ‘I don’t think you could have

improved on the story of your book’, Olivier did not record her own estimation of Lady Into Fox,

though wrote of Garnett’s novel Go She Must that it was ‘a good piece of writing, but not much else.’

[Olivier, 'Diary (December 1925 - December 1927)' (17/02/27); (15/02/27); David Garnett, 'Letter to

Edith Olivier' (27/05/27), Chippenham, Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Edith Olivier Papers

982/94]

121

swan was the trick.’379

However innovative and fresh Garnett was initially

considered, he soon became seen as the instigator of the fantastic subgenre.

Metamorphosis is potentially one of the broadest categories of the fantastic, since it is

essentially the alteration of one form to another; the possibilities are effectively

endless. Todorov terms metamorphosis ‘the collapse (which is also to say the

illumination) of the limit between matter and mind […] the transition from mind to

matter has become possible’.380

The infinitude of the mind is transferred to the

finitude of materiality – yet, though the scope is enormous, most novelists of the

period who address metamorphosis choose either human-into-animal or human-into-

plant. It is these metamorphoses, from human to another living creature, which

permit the interrogation of identity – as Caroline Walker Bynum writes, ‘change is the

test, the limit, of all denotations of the term “identity”.’381

In raising the possibility of

limitlessness, metamorphosis draws attention to the extant limits of identity. This

most nebulous of entities was questioned through myriad modernist devices, but

metamorphosis acts as a concretisation of literary devices. Rather than playing with

narrative form, metamorphosis fiction plays with physical form, making quandaries

about personal identity more concrete and immediate. While questions of

middlebrow identity are usually corporate – on the level of family, geographical

community, or as an alternative literary community within the ‘battle of the brows’ –

metamorphosis affirms a determinedly personal identity. Physical change, with its

fixed parameters, raises questions which are necessarily about the individual.

379

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.159 380

Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre p.114 381

Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001) p.19

122

Metamorphosis is traditionally considered a narrative affliction, ‘morbid’ and

‘typically violent’.382

Although change is an integral part of any aspiration or

betterment, metamorphosis has, as Marina Warner writes, ‘within the Judaeo-

Christian tradition […] marked out heterodoxy, instability, perversity, unseemliness,

[and] monstrosity.’383

In fiction it often has an unwilled and uncontrollable nature –

or is at least beyond the control of the individual experiencing change – and G.K.

Chesterton summarises that in mythological literature ‘black magic is that which blots

out or disguises the true form of a thing; while white magic, in the good sense,

restores it to its form and not another.’384

Change is seen as inherently fearsome and

false, while restoration is inherently trustworthy and, as it were, reinstating a truth (a

view challenged by narratives such as Lolly Willowes, which appears to use

metamorphosis as an act of restoration.)

More fundamentally, change within a narrative is frequently motivated by concerns

about change in the world outside the narrative – rather than the ‘sudden

transformations […] wrought by the most inadequate means’ which Walter Scott

announced took place in the ‘fantastic mode of writing […] without meaning or end

further than the surprize of the moment.’385

As seen, Lady Into Fox gives no

allowance to surprise, and no domestic fantastic novel of the period uses

metamorphosis inconsequentially. Metamorphosis can either express dissatisfaction

with the status quo, or conversely a fear of potential change – or, most commonly, a

response to and reflection of an extant societal change. Having conceded that

382

Irving Massey, The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis (Berkley, CA; Los Angeles, CA;

London: University of California Press, 1976) p.2; p.17 383

Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

pp.35f 384

G.K. Chesterton, 'Magic and Fantasy in Fiction' The Bookman, December (1929) 161-163, p.161 385

Scott, 'On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and Particularly on the Works of Ernest

Theodore William Hoffman' p.72

123

metamorphosis interrogates individual selfhood, this balance is redressed by the focus

put in Lady Into Fox upon the interdependence of identity, and how the wife’s

metamorphosis synergistically affects the husband. The shifting status of roles in

marriage in the 1910s and ‘20s informs both the writing and reception of Garnett’s

novel, and this is evident even in the title. As Garnett writes, ‘There can be very little

doubt that the oddity of the title had a good deal to do with the immense success of

the book.’386

This oddity is not evinced solely through paratextual announcement of

the fantastic, but also the suggestive connotations of what it would mean for a lady to

be a fox – or, in other words, a vixen – alluding towards contemporary discussions of

women’s sexuality and sexualisation. While several reviewers387

determined that

there was no moral to Lady Into Fox – and Garnett’s own account of its genesis is

disingenuously superficial388

– Leonard Woolf identified a hint of deeper meaning

(albeit an uncertain one):

But this second meaning, the parable which turns the fantasy into satire or

something greater and deeper than satire, was never insisted upon; it remained a

dim shadow in the book and, I suspect, even in the author’s mind.389

Woolf uses the language of the unconscious to suggest a haziness in Garnett’s

intentionality, yet the ‘dim shadow’ extends to Woolf’s critical expectations; it is not

clear what he considers to be ‘greater and deeper than satire’, and there is a sense of

genre hierarchy in Woolf’s mind, as though Lady Into Fox can only warrant its praise

if it coheres with a schematisation of pre-existing genre echelons. His equation of a

386

Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest p.246 387

Lynd, 'New Novels' p.1184; E. S. P. H. New Witness (08/12/22) p.359, Chatto & Windus Archive

CW C/25 (Press Cuttings vol.23, 1922), University of Reading; Daily News (10/11/22), Chatto &

Windus Archive CW C/25 (Press Cuttings vol.23, 1922), University of Reading 388

Garnett’s claims that the novel sprung from a chance comment to his wife that she might turn into a

fox. [Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest pp.243f] 389

Woolf, 'Mr. Garnett's Second' p.115

124

deeper meaning with ‘parable’ indicates a desire for a framework through which to

read the narrative. Woolf is hunting for a code which will allow for this cohesion.

Although it is unwise to pin down Lady Into Fox to a single interpretive model, and

bearing in mind the novel’s ‘dim shadow’ in place of didacticism, reading the

narrative – and other metamorphosis novels of the period – through the code of

changing views of female sexuality offers a perspective on metamorphosis fiction

which corresponds with the wider anxiety concerning the metamorphosis of the

modern middlebrow marriage – and offers an interpretation which reaches beyond the

assessment of these novels as simply either frivolous or morbid.

‘Hold her husband and share his ecstasy’: marriage and sexual knowledge

Amongst those reviewers willing to identify a parallel story beneath the surface of

Lady Into Fox, the obvious slang use of vulpine imagery is common. Gerald Gould

writes ironically that ‘Every English country gentleman has, of course, pondered long

and seriously what he would do if his wife turned into a fox.’390

He draws attention to

the absurdity of the plot, but also to the fear of adultery or, more broadly, of the wife

undergoing a transformation which would alienate her from her husband – ‘the

vixenhood of the lady’, as another reviewer points out, being usually ‘merely

metaphorical, and mainly a matter of temper.’391

Most explicitly, J.D. Symon in

Illustrated London News writes:

Many novelists have shown us the sorrows of a man married to a vixen, but

until Mr. Garnett came along no one had seized the obvious allegory.392

390

Gould, 'Review of Lady Into Fox' p.116 391

Archibald T. Strong, ‘A Strange Tale’, Herald (Melbourne) (16/12/22), Chatto & Windus Archive

CW C/25 (Press Cuttings vol.23, 1922), University of Reading 392

J.D. Symon, 'Books of the Day' Illustrated London News, 03/03/23 (1923) p.334

125

This allegory is, however, resisted by Lady Into Fox. While I believe an

interpretation founded upon sexual anxieties of the 1920s is practicable, Garnett does

not castigate female promiscuity – indeed, Silvia Tebrick (the ‘Lady’ of the title) does

not commit adultery until she is entirely transformed, at which point it is with a fellow

fox. Her metamorphosis is certainly the result of previous ‘vixen’-like behaviour (in

the sense defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘an ill-tempered, quarrelsome

woman’, with use dating back to 1575; only 150 years after the first-documented

example of ‘vixen’ to refer to a female fox.)393

In seeking an allegory or narrative reason for change in any metamorphosis novel, the

relationship between the transformed person, pre- and post-metamorphosis,

determines whether an instance of metamorphosis is (to use Theodore Ziolkowski’s

terminology) metaphorical or metonymic. Ziolkowski defines these designations

thus:

Metaphoric metamorphosis means, in narrative, the transformation of an

individual into the object designated semiotically by his or her name […].

Metonymic metamorphosis, in contrast, designates the process by which an

individual is abruptly transformed into something with no semiotic connection

to his or her [name or] character.394

Metonymic metamorphosis is, thus, a theft, removing the individual’s social identity.

It is both a loss of individual rationality (that is, what might be expected to happen

next in the individual’s life) and a loss of genealogy, severing the individual from the

logical continuation of their family line, and removing the possibility of their own

393

"vixen, n. and adj.". OED Online, Oxford University Press http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/224224

(accessed September 16, 2013) 394

Theodore Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns (London; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005)

p.78

126

contribution to it. Metaphoric metamorphosis is, of course, still a disruption, but one

with an internal logic which re-imagines the individual’s identity, rather than

removing it.

Lady Into Fox has elements of both. Silvia’s maiden name is Fox, indicating a

somewhat heavy-handed metaphoric transformation – but in the reading process,

Silvia’s maiden name is only revealed to the reader after her metamorphosis has taken

place. Garnett disrupts the conventions of classical metamorphosis by undermining

the traditional structures governing foreshadowing and the causality of change.

The ‘obvious allegory’ is further threatened by the narrator’s insistence that

It is perhaps worth noting that there was nothing at all foxy or vixenish in her

appearance. On the contrary, she was a more than ordinarily beautiful and

agreeable woman.395

The cautious opening to this sentence, in the past tense, raises questions which will

recur throughout Lady Into Fox about layers of observation: it is unclear whether the

fact is worth noting by the narrator (who is doing so), or the reader (who may or may

not do so.) Maintaining a model of suggesting, revoking, and reinstating readerly

expectations, the narrator disingenuously adds (having dismissed any visual

association with a fox) that Silvia’s hair was ‘dark, with a shade of red in it.’396

Turning points are not the only narrative moments which engage the reader’s

expectation and surprise; the reader is participating in an ongoing interpretive act and

most domestic fantastic novelists play with this awareness. Although the metaphor

made literal is a basis for much fantastic fiction, Garnett’s response to 1920s sexuality

395

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.4 396

Ibid. p.4

127

is more complex than a ‘vixen’ turned into a literal vixen – an interpretation which

would not encompass the wider impulse for metamorphosis fiction, nor that for

anthropomorphising animals into human relationships (as seen in His Monkey Wife

and G.E. Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia).

A corollary of the identity crises effected by metamorphosis is the transformation of

the married couple. Lady Into Fox – unlike, say, Flower Phantoms – does not focus

solely upon the individual in the process of change, but also on the response and

reaction to this metamorphosis, and the corresponding (albeit figurative)

metamorphosis of a marriage. Rather than a reflection of individual promiscuity, or

an indictment of this trend, Lady Into Fox can be read as a response to the changing

dynamics of marriage more generally. As John Woodrow Presley suggests, reference

to Noah (‘ur-couples’) ‘encourages us to regard this man and woman, of course, as

archetypal.’397

Although Mr. and Mrs. Tebrick are not timelessly archetypal couples,

they can be read as representing this archetypal marriage in the climate of the novel’s

contemporary reception, and Silvia’s metamorphosis as an indication of change, and

anxiety about change, in 1920s marriage norms.398

Silvia’s metamorphosis is not depicted as the result of individual dissatisfaction - ‘the

marriage was a very happy one’399

– rather, it is an embodiment of this wider change,

specifically the role of the wife in relation to sexuality, in both knowledge and

397

John Woodrow Presley, 'Fox, Vampire, Witch: Two Novels of Fantasy by Graves and Garnett'

Focus on Robert Graves and His Contemporaries, 2/2 (1994) 26-30, p.26 398

It is worth noting that there seems to be no evidence, beyond Garnett’s own bisexual relationships,

that Lady Into Fox is covertly intended to portray homosexuality, or (in Wendy Faris’ words) ‘uses

animals to figure unexpressed anger at the social norm of traditional heterosexual marriage’. While the

fantastic is obviously used for this purpose in some narratives, such as Radclyffe Hall’s ‘Miss Ogilvy

Finds Herself’, in this instance Faris is a victim of over-eagerness to associate anything unusual with

codified same-sex desire. [Wendy B. Faris, 'Bloomsbury's Beasts: The Presence of Animals in the

Texts and Lives of Bloomsbury' Yearbook of English Studies, 37/1 (2007) 107-125, p.111] 399

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.4

128

enjoyment of sex – far, I would argue, from D.B.D. Asker’s suggestion that it

represents ‘a young bride’s disquiet at the trauma of love’.400

Set in 1880 to

exaggerate the variance between a wife’s traditional role in marriage and its evolving

ethos, Lady Into Fox contrasts the personae of lover and wife. ‘They were still at this

time like lovers in their behaviour’, the narrator writes towards the beginning; Mr.

Tebrick is described as ‘so much more like a lover than a husband’.401

In both

instances, ‘lover’ can be framed only through simile, as though it were incompatible

with marriage – and as though, by being amorous, the Tebricks were destabilising the

accepted codes of both their marriage, and marriage as a wider pattern of behaviour.

The disparity between their loving marriage and the variety depicted in the popular

press is indicated by two differing glosses of the novel: in his foreword to a 1966

reprint, Garnett writes that the ‘subject was a reductio ad absurdum of marital

fidelity’, whereas the same terminology had been used in a 1923 review which stated

that ‘the theme [is], indeed, only a reductio ad absurdum of the theory of indissoluble

marriage.’402

The main distinction between ‘fidelity’ and ‘indissoluble marriage’ is

the extent of the husband’s willing affection – that is, whether or not his actions are

motivated by love. When Silvia-as-fox does later trick her husband, it is ironically

seen as a reversion to stereotypical wifely behaviour which she had previously not

exemplified: ‘he had never been deceived once by his wife in the course of their

married life’; he was not ‘one of your stock ordinary husbands’.403

This ‘stock

400

D.B.D. Asker, 'Vixens and Values: The Modern Metamorphoses of Garnett and Vercors' Canadian

Review of Comparative Literature, 10/2 (1983) 182-191, p.184 401

Garnett, Lady into Fox pp.5f 402

David Garnett, Lady into Fox (New York: Norton, 1922 repr.1966) [n.p.]; A.E. Randall, 'New

Novels' New Age, 12/04/23 (1923) 389-391, p.390. Irwin suggests that David Garnett hoped the show

the limits of fidelity far more than he wished to recommend extreme fidelity as a virtue’, but this focus

is still on the concept of fidelity, rather than legal reform. [Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A

Rhetoric of Fantasy p.27] 403

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.54; p.53

129

ordinary husband’ is the figure resisted by Mr. Tebrick at the beginning of novel, and

one disappearing from the middlebrow marriage – but is closer to the husband of 1924

spoof Gentleman Into Goose by Christopher Ward. Its full title, Gentleman into

Goose, Being the Exact and True Account of Mr. Timothy Teapot Gent., of

Puddleditch, in Dorset, that was Changed to a great Grey Gander at the wish of his

Wife. How, though a Gander, he wear Breeches and Smoak a Pipe. How he near lost

his life to his Dog Tyger satirically plays upon the eighteenth-century style of Lady

Into Fox, but the subtlety in Garnett’s use of metamorphosis is, naturally, omitted.

Ward’s Mr. and Mrs. Teapot are an unhappy couple, given to ‘argument and

bickering’, and this is viewed as the common nature of all marriages.404

Mrs. Teapot

keeps quiet about her husband’s metamorphosis into a goose solely because ‘this

wishing of husbands into geese might become a popular sport with women and the

supply of geese so much increased as to bring about a glut of feathers and a fall in the

price thereof.’405

The sentimental framework of spousal response and adaptation in

Lady Into Fox is overridden with an exaggeration of the domestic details of that

novel, and a discussion of love becomes one of commerce.

The metamorphosis in Gentleman Into Goose is less interesting than Silvia Tebrick’s,

because it is not accompanied by an emotional or reflective change or coping process

in the spouse – but, of course, its purpose is more limited: to lampoon Garnett’s novel

rather than reflect the world outside these works. Like Mrs. Tebrick, Mr. Teapot ends

the novel by dying, but because his wife eats him. Although both Lady Into Fox and

Gentleman Into Goose use the stock figures of the indifferent, passionless marriage,

404

Christopher Ward, Gentleman into Goose, etc. (London: T.W. Laurie, 1924) p.34 405

Ibid. p.39

130

Ward endorses their existence, while Garnett uses a marriage which deviates from the

supposed norm in order to demonstrate how the norm was itself, in fact, changing.

Lady Into Fox can be read as responding to the evolving nature of female sexuality

within marriage – or, more specifically, women’s awareness of sexuality before

making their marriage vows. Marie Stopes’ Married Love is the most remembered, if

not the most radical, of the many contemporary marital guides aimed at unmarried

women (selling 400,000 copies by 1923406

), and the availability of this knowledge as

a public discourse altered the expected dynamics of marital relations. Formerly, as

Mary Scharlieb writes in 1915, it was ‘by no means uncommon for unfortunate brides

to say that they had been shocked by learning after marriage the facts of married

life’.407

Even as late as 1939, R. Edynbry could still caution that ‘sexual ignorance

both in man and woman is probably the greatest of the ills that can wreck married

happiness’408

– intriguingly not singling out women – but there was little excuse for it

by this date. Sex had become a matter of public discussion; Scharlieb even suggests

(with some hyperbole) as early as 1914 that ‘questions of free love, divorce, incest,

and polygamy are constantly before us, and are discussed in a light-hearted

manner’,409

reflecting the typical middlebrow response of levity towards potentially

dangerous topics. The domestic sphere was opened up to the public forum,

destabilising the boundaries of the traditional marriage, with neither the marriage

vows nor the bedroom door acting any longer as the beginning of knowledge or the

veil of privacy. Stopes’ significance lies largely in her status as a cultural symbol and

406

Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs

(Hampshire: Macmillan, 1988) p.3 407

Mary Scharlieb, The Seven Ages of Woman (London: Cassell & Co., 1915) pp.66f 408

R. Edynbry, Real Life Problems and Their Solution (London: Odhams Press, 1939) p.172 409

Mary Scharlieb, What It Means to Marry or Young Women & Marriage (London: Cassell & Co.,

1914) p.48

131

byword for sexual openness in the period; Laura, in E.M. Delafield’s 1927 novel

about a woman tempted to commit adultery, The Way Things Are, hides ‘a small

volume of Dr Marie Stopes […] beneath a pile of her more intimate underwear at the

back of her chest of drawers.’410

Her readership would instantly recognise allusion to

Married Love, even without the title being given, and a sizeable portion would also

empathise with the combination of a desire to read the book, and to conceal the fact of

reading from one’s family (the connotations of it being kept among Laura’s ‘more

intimate underwear’ are self-evident). Stopes’ works were far from the only non-

fiction books about sex being read in the interwar years, but she was perhaps the only

author whose name acted as shorthand in quite this manner.

Although all guides to sexuality (by definition) encourage the advancement of sexual

knowledge, this knowledge brought with it a transformation of the archetypal

marriage which, though often welcomed, was also inherently unsettling. The wider

availability of this information necessarily sexualised women – both as sexualised

objects, and sexualised subjects. Women became increasingly self-sexualised

subjects by their own knowledge, and approached marriage with some eagerness to

‘hold her husband and share his ecstasy’,411

rather than the reluctant compliance that

had (as Maud Braby notes in 1919) previously been advised: ‘maidens are now given

tacitly to understand that the subject of sex is a repulsive one, wholly unfit for their

consideration, and the functions of sex are loathsome, though necessary.’412

Once

more, the term ‘tacitly’ demonstrates the clouded obscurity with which the topic had

been addressed and Braby’s scholastic or clinical terminology (‘subject’,

410

E.M. Delafield, The Way Things Are (London: Virago, 1927 repr.1988) p.99. Quoted in Humble,

The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s p.226 411

Edynbry, Real Life Problems and Their Solution p.194 412

Braby, Modern Marriage and How To Bear It p.101

132

‘consideration’, ‘functions’) emphasises both the absence of pleasure and the de-

personalisation in the instruction received by these ‘maidens’. Works like Braby’s act

to reverse this trend, producing sexualised subjects with a personal investment in their

knowledge, discovering in their reading an ‘affirmation of women’s sexual

subjectivity’.413

Women were also becoming, however, sexualised objects, as men grew aware of their

advancing knowledge and, thus, presumed carnality. The maturity of a woman was

seen as a moment of metamorphosis, impelled by a man: ‘It has been said that a youth

grows into a man almost spontaneously, but a girl has to be kissed into a woman.’414

The illustration is akin to fairytale – the frog being kissed into a prince – and attempts

to normalise this trope of indulgent myth. But girl-into-woman represented a wider

metamorphosis, of woman’s accepted role before and during marriage. The

conflicting impulses of passion and propriety seem aligned to the private and the

public, but these divisions were no longer secure. Scharlieb advises ‘passion under

reasonable control – the beneficent household fire, not the devastating lightning’415

but, even with her homely metaphor, it is unclear whether she is advocating self-

control, spousal control, or a fusion of the two.

The changing conventions of marriage inform a reading of Lady Into Fox in

particular, but also provide a wider explanation for the choice of metamorphosis as a

domestic fantastic form. It represents a fundamental change in the framework of the

home, and when the human morphs into another living creature (whether animal or

413

Karen Chow, 'Popular Sexual Knowledges and Women's Agency in 1920s England: Marie Stope's

Married Love and E.M. Hull's The Sheik' Feminist Review, 63 (1999) 64-87, p.64 414

Edynbry, Real Life Problems and Their Solution p.176 415

Scharlieb, What It Means to Marry or Young Women & Marriage p.129

133

plant) they have transformed into an entity which demonstrates no shame in sexual

activity and reproduction, which becomes simply another function of life. While

Lady Into Fox ought not to be read as an extended allegory, ignoring the surface

events, and it is further removed from the social anxieties it responds to than creation

narratives like The Love-Child, it remains influenced by these marital and societal

issues, and the product of a certain period. In the wake of Lady Into Fox’s success,

the transformation of personas in marriage also influences various other examples of

metamorphosis and uncanny fiction; I shall examine the different narrative responses

through the categories woman-as-animal, woman-as-plant, and non-fantastic

depictions of marriage to an animal.

Woman-as-animal

Although Silvia does not correspond with the specific identification of wife-as-vixen,

the sexualisation of women does bring the idea of the woman-as-animal into play.

Within Lady Into Fox, Silvia’s (human) sexual interest is addressed only covertly –

besides the depiction of the pair as lovers – and in semantics which overlap with the

animalistic, as well as continuing the novel’s playfulness with perception and

perspective:

Her old nurse said: “Miss Silvia was always a little wild at heart,” though if this

was true it was never seen by anyone else except her husband.416

Garnett allows a coy sexual frisson to enter the biographical tone. In describing the

genesis of the novel, Garnett explains that he was ‘teasing and making love to [his

416

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.4

134

wife] by telling her how like she was to a wild animal’;417

this wildness corresponds

with the crossing of social boundaries, including those delineated for the private

sphere – it is not so much a breach of etiquette as an embrace of unbridled natural

behaviour. Certainly, the idea of sexual progressiveness being animalistic was

widespread (the ‘we’re all animals, really’ line of thought, which Stella Gibbons

satirised retrospectively through the figure of Mr. Mybug in Cold Comfort Farm).418

A justification for less rigid sexual mores, based on affinity with animals, is presented

by Walter Gallichan arguing that, ‘[b]iologically, the human being is more erotic than

the higher mammals’,419

and taken to curious extremes by Floyd Dell, who uses the

example of protozoa (which separated sex and reproduction) as an illustration of the

ideal 1927 marriage.420

More specifically, Garnett had precedent for the fox as a sexual image, in Lawrence’s

The Fox, serialised in The Dial between May and August 1922. The final instalment

thus appeared three months before Lady Into Fox was published. Although

Lawrence’s novel (or perhaps, as indeed Garnett’s could be labelled, novella) is not

fantastic, his use of vulpine metaphor relies upon the sexualised energy of animalist

imagery. The story opens with a real fox tormenting the spinster March; it ‘somehow

dominated her unconsciousness’.421

When Henry arrives,

to March he was the fox. Whether it was the thrusting forward of his head or

the glisten of fine whitish hairs of the ruddy cheekbones, or the bright keen

417

Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest p.244 418

In another context, human-as-animal could be read as a reflection of the aftermath of brutality and

slaughter in the First World War – it is not a metamorphosis model which can be aligned with a single

interpretation - but the context of Lady Into Fox and 1920s writing on sex and marriage supports this

reading. 419

Walter Gallichan, The Psychology of Marriage (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1917) p.81 420

Floyd Dell, The Outline of Marriage (London: The Richards Press, 1927) pp.31-8 421

D.H. Lawrence, 'The Fox' The Dial, May (1922) 471-489, p.476

135

eyes, that can never be said – but the boy was to her the fox, and she could not

see him otherwise.422

It does not take an avid Freudian to identify the sexual undertones of ‘the thrusting

forward of his head’ and, although Garnett never goes this far, he is inevitably

influenced by the animalism of sexual imagery in the 1920s. Freudian associations

with this representation of sexuality are evident, and do not need emphasising;

whether or not middlebrow readers agreed with Freudianism (and, as has been seen,

they largely did not), they, like Garnett, could not avoid being affected in their

interpretation of narratives which incorporate examinations of unusual marital

relations.

Taking a step much further back than Lawrence, Garnett openly acknowledges his

debt to Ovid in developing the title Lady Into Fox (originally suffixed ‘The

Metamorphosis of Mrs. Tebrick’), but, as Sylvia Lynd points out in Time and Tide,

‘Garnett begins his story where Ovid would have ended.’423

Metamorphosis is not a

solution or conclusion, but a catalyst, and Garnett studies the testing and unravelling

of a marriage, rather than an Ovidian conflict between sexual predator and unwilling

woman; Garnett domesticates Ovid. Asker suggests that Silvia is very similar to

Ovid’s Daphne, metamorphosing to avoid sexual encounter.424

Yet Silvia clearly has

sexual encounter after her metamorphosis, bearing the tangible result of this encounter

in her litter of offspring. Her animality ironically distances her from accusations of

carnality, since the sexual act holds no moral complexity for animals. The role of

mother – identified soon after her transformation; ‘there was something very motherly

422

Ibid. p.479 423

Lynd, 'New Novels' p.1184 424

Asker, 'Vixens and Values: The Modern Metamorphoses of Garnett and Vercors' p.184

136

in his vixen’425

– also precludes accusations to which the sexually willing 1920s wife

was vulnerable, of temptress or nymphomaniac. Curiously, Silvia’s metamorphosis

brings her a role which is less threatening to the paradigm of the home. An Ovidian

narrative, also from Metamorphoses, which proves more apt is that of Actaeon and

Diana. Actaeon was turned into a stag and killed by his own dogs, for having seen

Diana nude – Garnett seems to allude to this when Mr. Tebrick pre-emptively kills his

dogs, and in Silvia’s eventual death. Thematically, it is also closer: Actaeon is

transformed as a punishment for excess sexuality, rather than (as with Daphne) to

preserve celibacy.

Although Orlando is determinedly not middlebrow, it requires mention in a chapter

on metamorphosis. While Orlando also, of course, uses the trope of metamorphosis

to play with questions of sexual identity, and (as with Lady Into Fox) from an external

perspective in the figure of the biographer, it is a localised concern within the

framework of human gender roles. Orlando’s fundamental humanity is not

threatened. Woolf does, however, tease with an animalistic image when Archduchess

Harriet appears:

For this lady resembled nothing so much as a hare; a hare startled, but obdurate;

a hare whose timidity is overcome by an immense and foolish audacity; a hare

that sits upright and glowers at its pursuer with great, bulging eyes; with ears

erect but quivering, with nose pointed, but twitching. This hare, moreover, was

six feet high.426

Scornful and unglamorous simile is transformed into metaphor at the beginning of the

second sentence, as though the prolonged language of comparison (and thus

difference) in simile had elided the object with its (her) comparative. The hare is

425

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.46 426

Woolf, Orlando p.109

137

overdetermined by repeated, cumulative descriptions, each seeming to return to the

beginning of the sentence like so many false starts, in a sequence of descriptive

defeat. This representation labours the falseness of appearances – and Harriet does,

indeed, turn out to be a man in disguise. Woolf is perhaps hinting towards the

tradition that witches metamorphosed into hares,427

and playfully uses conventions of

fantastic fiction outside the actual fantastic events of the novel. This

overdetermination, and Woolf’s experimentation with fantastic stylistics and form,

undermines the fanfare and significance which usually accompany examples of pivot-

as-event. Harold Skulsky writes that

Orlando rebels against the tyranny of the real, the actual, and the stereotypical

by casually trespassing on boundaries she comes to regard as artificial; her

transformation is simply the temporal emblem of her multiple residence in

universes that are held by common sense to be mutually inaccessible.428

This interpretation aligns Orlando more closely with magical realism (in which, as

Chanady writes, ‘nothing surprises the characters, since magic is the norm’)429

since,

in truly fantastic novels, the line between real/not-real is not artificial, but instead firm

and obvious – albeit one which is crossed. Woolf’s intentional linguistic instability

between fantasy and reality – images hovering ever on the brink of metaphor, and

never securely real – precludes the formal division between the two which is

fundamental to the fantastic.

This formal division does not, however, imply binary states of identity. Despite

referring to this category as woman-as-animal, in Lady Into Fox the transformation of

427

Margaret Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1921) p.230 428

Harold Skulsky, Metamorphosis: The Mind in Exile (London; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1981) p.221 429

Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy pp.2f

138

Silvia into a fox is far from instantaneous. Although Irwin describes metamorphosis

as a ‘[c]hange of form so crucial as to persuade the reader of the primacy of form in

identity’,430

and, elsewhere, that it is the ‘most completely objective of the changes

that can produce fantasy,’431

physical and psychological transformations are not in

fact concurrent or even synergetic in Lady Into Fox, and ‘form’ is unstable as a

marker of identity. The reaches of objective observation are curtailed by this divorce

between form and persona. Initially Silvia’s metamorphosis does not seem to affect

the status quo of marital harmony; she may be an animal, but she is not yet

animalistic. After the physical change, the narrative suggests, ‘there began what was

now to be their ordinary life together.’432

Garnett’s use of ‘ordinary’ reflects the

dominance of the domestic in this fantastic narrative, and also the relativity of the

term. It is a word which first appears on the second page of the novel, when the

narrator (somewhat disingenuously) suggests that a gradual physical metamorphosis

‘would not have been so difficult to reconcile to our ordinary conceptions’.433

Perhaps playing on the reproductive definition of ‘ordinary conceptions’, Garnett also

leaves the same uncertainty attached to the idea of the ‘ordinary’ – a word which

requires consensus of perspective, reiterated by ‘our’, and defuses the extraordinary

fantastic events.

In terms of their marriage, the ‘ordinary’ initially seems to be a distorted version of

accepted niceties. Silvia still engages in an almost iconical, borderline parodic,

version of domesticity, dressing in a bed-jacket and drinking from a saucer:

430

Irwin, 'The Metamorphoses of David Garnett' p.386 431

Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy p.104 432

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.12 433

Ibid. p.2

139

All this showed him, or so he thought, that his wife was still herself; there was

so little wildness in her demeanour and so much delicacy and decency.434

While this contradicts the earlier assertion that Silvia has ‘some disposition to

wildness’,435

it draws upon the contrast between the ideal wife of the Victorian period

(delicate and decent – both nebulous attributes) and the sexualised wife emerging in

the 1920s. Mr. Tebrick’s claim that Silvia ‘was still herself’ suggests that he

considers selfhood to be entirely non-visual. In contrast to modern philosophical

views, Mr. Tebrick believes (and it is fundamental to the ongoing narrative in Lady

Into Fox) that personality is separable from form, which is also a central concept in

Ovid’s Metamorphosis: ‘animam sic simper eandem / esse, sed in varias doceo

migrare figuras’ (“I teach that the spirit is always the same but migrates into

constantly changing bodies”.)436

This separation cannot, of course, be visual. Ardon

Lyon addresses the philosophical difficulties of assessing the physical and

psychological constituents of identity, when either are in a process of change:

One feature which leads to puzzlement about personal identity is that although

the concept of a person, and hence of remaining the same person, is more

closely tied to the mental characteristics of memory and personality than it is to

the physical property of retaining the same body, it is a contingent feature of the

world we live in that while a person remains alive the former are liable to

change more drastically than the latter.437

It is significant that the parts of us which make these distinctions and create

associations for identity are, of course, the ‘mental characteristics of memory and

personality’; the body is estranged from the act of observation, being only an object of

observation, not a participating observer – and so, when it becomes more significant

in establishing identity (or it must be acknowledged as more capable of stasis than the

434

Ibid. p.9 435

Ibid. p.4 436

Quoted (with translation) in Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns p.75 437

Lyon, 'On Remaining the Same Person' p.175

140

mind) then it interrupts a model which relies solely on the mind for both the

establishment and the recognition of identity. Although Silvia is, obviously, an

anomaly to the norm Lyon predicates, her physical change provokes less ontological

confusion than the gradual metamorphosis of her character and humanity - because

the latter is less measurable, since it is not a facet of selfhood which is empirically

observable. Silvia (and Judy in Flower Phantoms, and Mr. Mannering in Green

Thoughts) do not lose their mental characteristics with any immediacy, and thus it is

far harder to quantify the pace at, or extent to which, this non-corporeal change takes

place – echoing the unknowable rate of change of any broader, corporate evolution.

The imprecise measuring device for Silvia’s elusive metamorphosis is, once again, the

middlebrow barometer of etiquette. The fantastic, as discussed in my second chapter,

is sometimes broadly depicted as a contravention of narrative etiquette; Massey sees

this breach more particularly in ‘the apparatus of metamorphosis […]; as if the

bounds of psychological propriety had been violated.’438

These boundaries are

amorphous and unquantifiable, but the violation is no less significant for that. In Lady

Into Fox, the barometer gauges the level of Silvia’s propriety, and thus (by a

middlebrow adjudication) her humanity. Arguably the novel’s most significant

metamorphosis is not the transition from lady to fox, but from anthropomorphic fox to

animalistic fox. Silvia initially experiences ‘vexation and distress’ at seeing Mr.

Tebrick perform housework inexpertly:

Then, forgetful of the decency and the decorum which she had at first imposed

upon herself never to run upon all fours, she followed him everywhere, and if he

did one thing wrong she stopped him and showed him the way of it.[…] This

438

Massey, The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis p.28

141

womanliness in her never failed to delight him, for it showed she was still his

wife, buried as it were in the carcase of a beast but with a woman’s soul.’439

Her agitation about correctly maintaining the house – about domestic propriety – is

also that which occasions her first steps away from ‘decency and decorum’; yet it is

this which reminds Mr. Tebrick of her ‘womanliness’, indicating that the public

veneer of decorum does not equate absolutely with that which makes Silvia (in her

husband’s eyes) a woman. The incongruously carnal, even gory, image of Silvia

being ‘buried […] in the carcase of a beast’ exacerbates this path away from the

decent, and the contrast of body and soul furthers an argument which could be

presented in relation to the 1920s woman’s combination of sexual and spiritual

qualities, even without the literalisation of metamorphosis.

The first signs that the mental characteristics of the animal are overtaking the

psychology of the woman are connected with table manners.440

At a pivotal moment,

Silvia is discovered ‘crunching the very bones’ of chicken; ‘it may indeed be regretted

that Mrs. Tebrick had been so exactly well-bred, and in particular that her table

manners had always been so scrupulous.’441

Even when contrasting her growing

animalism with her previously perfect etiquette, the phrase ‘so exactly well-bred’

collocates with the sphere of animal husbandry as much as the finishing school.

Although Silvia’s human character had held little sign of latent bestiality (besides that

‘disposition to wildness’), the semantic choices Garnett makes to demonstrate contrast

often, in fact, form a linguistic locus of the two.

439

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.15 440

Even etiquette guides that purported to be ‘up to date’ in the 1920s still focused a thorough attention

on table manners. Constance Burleigh’s Etiquette up to Date contains such details as: ‘A spoon and

fork will be laid for sweets, but when possible the fork only is used.’ [Constance Burleigh, Etiquette

Up To Date (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1925) p.52] 441

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.24

142

Having been caught trying to burrow away, Silvia ‘even fawned on him, but in a

good-natured kind of way, as if she were a very good wife putting up wonderfully

with her husband’s temper.’442

Although mirroring the role advocated by the more

traditional marriage guides for wives, Silvia’s wifeliness is presented now only as a

simile. If metamorphosis is metaphor-made-literal, then it relegates other literal truths

into the place of metaphor.

Woman-as-plant

The metaphor-made-literal is self-evident in Ronald Fraser’s Flower Phantoms, where

Judy has already been fixated with the idea of being a plant:

Her skirt was too short to cover her knees, so she drew up a rug, turned over,

hid her face in a cushion, and tried to imagine that she was a young plant.443

While the novel contains substantial metaphoric foreshadowing (as seen when Judy

‘felt like a tender shoot’444

) in this instance she bypasses metaphor and imagines the

metamorphosis itself, foreshortening the gap between imagery and actual event.

Although woman-as-plant is, like woman-as-animal, a subset of metamorphosis

within the broader field of living organisms, they are competing ideas. Fraser does

sexualise the image (the abbreviated skirt) but focuses upon the insentience of the

plant throughout the novel. Neither fox nor flower can communicate (a hubris seen

throughout metamorphosis fiction) but the fox is sentient. It is curious, then, that

Flower Phantoms and John Collier’s short narrative (published as an individual

monograph) with a similar metamorphosis, Green Thoughts, are focalised through the

442

Ibid. p.49 443

Fraser, Flower Phantoms p.10 444

Ibid. p.26

143

experiences of the metamorphosing human, rather than an observer, since this must

incorporate the loss of communicative ability. At the point of transformation, Fraser

tries to convey this passing into insentience:

“Be my body, seed of this flower,” she prayed, and the world faded. She was

lost in a darkness, and strange and dark was the beginning of this experience.445

Judy’s metamorphosis does not result in the unravelling ontological confusion of

Lady Into Fox, but instead an immediate severing of determined reality. In this sense,

human-into-plant narratives reflect (in a way that human-into-animal narratives do

not) Rosemary Jackson’s ideas about metamorphosis as equivalent to Freud’s ‘death

drive’, which is not a desire to cease being but ‘a state of entropy, and the desire for

undifferentiation he termed an entropic pull’.446

That is, the referential nature between

all objects and experiences is blurred into a total lack of distinction. And yet Fraser

cannot entirely sacrifice coherence for this portrayal. Definitions of sentience and

insentience cease to be practicable, when translated through the formal requirements

of focalised narrative. The absence of communicable reality can only be translated in

vague, amorphous words, like ‘strange and ‘dark’.

Again, plant metamorphosis is treated with the semantics of sexuality, most overtly in

references to ‘body’ and ‘seed’, and a moment of metamorphosis which is almost

orgasmic in description. But, since Judy’s metamorphosis is in unmarried isolation –

she is engaged, and virginal – it represents a personal sexual awakening, rather than

Silvia’s embodiment of supposedly animalistic sexual awareness within marriage.

Judy is closer than Silvia to mythological Daphne; she does use metamorphosis to

445

Ibid. p.133 446

Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion p.73

144

escape sexual encounter. She enjoys kisses, but worries about their permanence, and

is an uncertain fiancée:

In the institution of marriage she now clearly perceived the whole gross-

fingered incapacity of mankind for any subtlety in the manipulation of its

affairs.447

With ‘green-fingered’ hiding behind this crude compound word, Judy is repelled by

the sexual act itself; her disgust is not towards her fiancée personally, but regarding a

broad ‘institution’, and ‘mankind’ as a whole. She identifies the act with the species,

and retreats from both, into the world of flowers. Like Daphne, she takes on the form

of an inanimate, living organism. Metamorphosis, for both Silvia and Judy, is an

inadvertent response to the new marital role of women – whether through a failure to

rise to it, or a recognition of its destabilising affect on the home.

John Collier treats the sexuality of plants more comically in Green Thoughts, relying

upon a stock humorous version of the spinster and maintaining this figure’s

characteristics post-metamorphosis: a bee fertilises ‘the maiden lip of Cousin Jane’.448

This cross-species sexual encounter is intended to be solely comic. In Lady Into Fox

a (presumably) similar instance is depicted more obliquely, and without humorous

intent. Some readers – both contemporary reviewers and subsequent critics – have

identified no ambiguity in glossing the following passage as ‘drunken sodomy’ or ‘an

entirely displeasing anamality [sic]’,449

but Garnett does not depict this overtly:

To what lengths he went then in that drunken humour I shall not offend my

readers by relating, but shall only say that he was so drunk and sottish that he

had a very imperfect recollection of what had passed when he woke the next

447

Fraser, Flower Phantoms p.66 448

John Collier, Green Thoughts (Furnival Books; London: W. Jackson, 1932) p.36 449

Irwin, 'The Metamorphoses of David Garnett' p.388; Clement K. Shorter, 'A Literary Letter' The

Sphere, 18/08/23 (1923) p.ii

145

morning. There is no exception to the rule that if a man drink heavily at night

the next morning will show the other side to his nature.450

Garnett uses the eighteenth-century style he has adopted to cloak the scene in

vagueness, leaving the deed to the imagination of the reader (coercing them into some

complicity, should they assume bestiality), and plays with the connotations of the

word ‘nature’ in this unnatural union. Collier’s His Monkey Wife goes one step

further, and closes the novel with a consummation scene between Mr. Fatigay and

Emily the chimp, which is clearly intended as a positive resolution:

Under her long and scanty hair he caught glimpses of a plum-blue skin. Into the

depths of those all-dark lustrous eyes, his spirit slid with no sound of splash.

She uttered a few low words, rapidly, in her native tongue. The candle,

guttering beside the bed, was strangled in the grasp of a prehensile foot, and

darkness received, like a ripple in velvet, the final happy sigh.451

Borrowing semantics from the vogue of exoticism spearheaded by E.M. Hull’s

bestselling The Sheik (1919), Collier makes no reference to Emily’s species in this

final paragraph, only that she is ‘native’. He teasingly references ‘prehensile’, a word

often used in reference to monkeys but which actually means ‘able to grasp’ without

any inherent simian specificity – and the word is applied by Collier to the interspecies

‘foot’, rather than ‘tail’. The scene could equally apply to a human relationship

(perhaps it is not too fanciful to compare the ‘final happy sigh’ with the orgasmic

conclusion of Ulysses, whether or not Collier intended such a reference) and Collier

ends the novel drawing attention to the characters’ similarities, and only briefly

alluding to that which makes the novel controversial.

450

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.36 451

Collier, His Monkey Wife: or, Married to a Chimp p.274

146

Non-fantastic versions of metamorphosis

Complementary to Lady Into Fox are interwar novels, such as His Monkey Wife,

which use the impulse for metamorphosis without crossing the line from metaphor to

literality, and thus offering non-fantastic variants of metamorphosis. This definition

could be extended almost infinitely – the characteristics noted in a review of Lady

Into Fox by Arthur Waugh, ‘Woman into fox, man into wolf, both alike into the

ferocity of the tiger’,452

are metaphoric traits which dominate much romantic fiction

of the period. Closer to the borderline are novels which use Lady Into Fox’s central

trope of marriage to an animal, even if (as in the case of His Monkey Wife) the animal

was never human, or (as with Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo) the spouse is put in the

position of an animal, but never physically metamorphoses.

As shown above (and, paratextually, in the title) His Monkey Wife concerns the

marriage between a man and a monkey – or, in fact, a chimpanzee – named Emily. In

this way, Collier concretises the idea of partner-as-animal without recourse to the

fantastic – perhaps explaining why, given the supposed affinity between the fantastic

and improper etiquette, Osbert Sitwell congratulated him on ‘perfect literary

manners’.453

Rather than demonstrating a lowering of Mr. Fatigay’s standard for an

intellectual companion, Emily is, ironically, better educated and more civilised than

Mr. Fatigay’s (human) fiancée Amy. Collier contrasts the anthropomorphised Emily

with the animalistic woman; human qualities are removed from the human. Where

Amy is selfish, rude, and wasteful, Emily is an ‘apt […] pupil in even the subtlest

452

Arthur Waugh, Daily Telegraph (16/1/23), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/25 (Press Cuttings

vol.23, 1922), University of Reading 453

Osbert Sitwell, Introduction to Collier, Green Thoughts p.11

147

points of the etiquette’,454

has her thoughts focalised through the highest register

(never the broken ‘Creole’ English used in another anthropomorphic-simian narrative,

discussed in the next chapter, G.E. Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia) and has so

cultured a mind that she translates the domestic debris Amy rejects as unwanted into

pieces belonging to an artistic inventory:

a dismembered bedstead and a chalky plaster cast suggested an excellent

Chirico; […] Van Gogh, in an early period, was represented by a pair of

crumpled boots, sad upon a broken cane chair; Picasso, by a shattered

mandoline and a dusty soda-water siphon disposed upon a sheet of newspaper in

the fireplace.455

Emily acts as an art historian of the domestic (and at least one reviewer followed suit;

Naomi Mitchison described the novel’s ‘opening décor of Gauguin-ish forest’456

in

her complimentary Time and Tide review). In the anthropomorphic ‘sad’, and the

graphically somatic ‘dismembered’, Collier demonstrates how Emily’s viewpoint is

not trammelled by orthodox adjectives; the fusing of species which has occurred in

her own character is transferred to her observations of objects around her. She creates

a cultural narrative from these items of junk, demonstrating the fundamentality of the

observer in the act of interpretation, but also projecting her own cerebral

transformation onto the objects, granting them a quasi-metamorphosis.

Yet, unlike Appius and Virginia, which (as shall be seen) treats a similar theme in a

maternal, rather than romantic, light (and thus pertains more closely to anxieties about

childlessness than those about marital sexuality), the focus in His Monkey Wife is not

upon Emily’s academic progress. This mental metamorphosis is achieved swiftly

and, while she cannot communicate verbally, she is soon able to read fluently.

454

Collier, His Monkey Wife: or, Married to a Chimp p.59 455

Ibid. p.109 456

Naomi Mitchison, 'New Fiction' Time and Tide, 13/12/30 (1930) p.1580

148

Although this could be considered a fantastic trait, Collier himself professes (in the

unpublished review he wrote of his own novel) that ‘he very consistently avoids

fantasy’.457

Instead of directing attention towards an evolutionary miracle, Collier’s

narrative concentrates upon Emily’s love for Mr. Fatigay – a love which is

exacerbated by reading his books:

She believed them all. The world that lay before her was irradiated by

Tennyson and Bernard Shaw, by Georgian poetry and Michael Arlen, and,

worse than all combined, by love.458

The middlebrow preoccupation with mimesis is taken to extremes, where Emily not

only looks for a reflection of reality, but cannot imagine that anything else would be

possible. She lives only in a world created by the assumption of mimesis and, in

Irwin’s words, ‘betrays a well-meaning gaucherie’ caused by ‘unassimilated literary

and moral culture.’459

Although there is no greatly extensive agreement between, say,

The Lady of Shalott and The Green Hat, these authors all aggrandise and romanticise

love – in contrast to Amy. She is influenced primarily by Freudian semantics, which

is a language Mr. Fatigay shares, albeit in a fairly unscholarly and euphemistic

vernacular. He wishes to consummate his engagement, complaining that ‘“if that is

unsatisfied everything else gets warped, and one’s nerves get upset, and everything’s

spoilt.”’ Amy’s retaliates on the battleground of Freudianism, advising Mr. Fatigay to

‘sublimate’.460

Emily represents both progressive and regressive traits of femininity,

457

Collier, His Monkey Wife: or, Married to a Chimp p.xvi 458

Ibid. p.14. Like other authors whose names were used as shorthand, Michael Arlen was something

of a stock figure for over-the-top aestheticism to many middlebrow writers. Bruce Marshall’s satirical

1929 novel High Brows dismisses a section of the reading public with the words ‘For most of them a

reference to the works of Michael Arlen was considered highbrow’, and one of Delafield’s comic

sketches features somebody attempting to write ‘a kind of satire, really, rather like Evelyn Waugh and

Michael Arlen mixed’. [Bruce Marshall, High Brows: An Extravaganza of Manners - Mostly Bad

(London: Jarrolds, 1929) p.182; E.M. Delafield, As Others Hear Us: A Miscellany (London:

Macmillan, 1937a), p.17] 459

Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy p.131 460

Collier, His Monkey Wife: or, Married to a Chimp p.150

149

seemingly evading any ‘complications’ brought about by the modernisation of

marriage. She does not question the woman’s subordinate position, happily seeing

Mr. Fatigay as an amalgam of man and master, yet she is also an embodiment of the

reason Kafka gave for so many of his contemporaries writing about animals: ‘an

expression of our longing for a free, natural life.’461

Whilst there is nothing free about

Gregor Samsa, Emily is free from fears about sexuality or anxieties over the wife’s

various potential roles within modern marriage, instead creating one which is partly,

indeed, ‘natural’ (her instinct) and partly borrowed from idealised fiction of the past,

without qualms about the topicality of her emotions.

Like Lady Into Fox (and, indeed, Green Thoughts, which concludes with Mr.

Mannering’s plant-self shrilly ‘voic[ing] its agony’462

), His Monkey Wife ends on a

primitive sound. But rather than a scream in the throes of death, the final sound is

Emily’s sigh in the consummation scene quoted above, which is (as Paul Theroux

writes) ‘a note of triumphant carnality.’463

Both Garnett and Collier choose to end

their narratives on an emotive, almost elemental sound. These sounds do not

distinguish between animal and human, but are vocal evocations of the overlapping

ground between the two, in the primitive feelings of pleasure or pain.

Non-fantastic variants of metamorphosis can embody the various linguistic methods

of describing change. His Monkey Wife and Lady Into Fox both portray the

literalisation of animalism metaphors (associated with discussions of sexuality), with

or without recourse to the fantastic. Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo uses neither the

461

Janouch, Conversations With Kafka pp.43f, quoted in Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns p.81 462

Collier, Green Thoughts p.56 463

Paul Theroux, Introduction to Collier, His Monkey Wife: or, Married to a Chimp p.xiii

150

fantastic nor an actual animal in the relationship, but turns instead to surrealism (albeit

a grounded surrealism) to depict spouse-as-animal.

Garnett manipulates the common trait of observing other humans; what Sylvia

Townsend Warner described as her wish ‘[t]o watch them like animals’.464

Following

foreshadowing slang from his fiancée (“You silly savage”; “You wild beast”465

), John

follows Josephine’s angry suggestion that he ‘“ought to be shut up and exhibited here

in the Zoo”’.466

By proffering himself, the passive voice of Josephine’s proposal is

rather defused; John is in an unusual position of combined power and powerlessness

during his voluntary life in an observed cage. His internment is the result of a lovers’

quarrel, because Josephine will not ‘give herself’ to John (the full extent of this gift is

not made explicit). In refusing to, she labels him ‘a tiger and not a human being’, and

compares him to ‘a baboon or a bear’,467

overdetermining his animalism and returning

to the idea of sexuality as animal behaviour. Raymond Mortimer sees A Man in the

Zoo as ‘a contribution to the modern theory of love. […] The book might have been

called Gentleman into Ape. Love, Mr. Garnett says, makes beasts of us’.468

There

could be no clearer affinity than that drawn by Josephine with her metaphor and

similes; the rest of the novel is the practical outworking of these images. Once more,

Garnett allows his title to prefigure the central event, so the dynamics of receptive

surprise are not called upon, but the absence of the fantastic could, after the success of

Lady Into Fox, be considered itself unexpected.

464

Morgan, Writers at Work p.30 465

David Garnett, 'A Man in the Zoo (1924)' Lady Into Fox and A Man in the Zoo (London: Chatto &

Windus, 1928) 93-190, p.102; p.103 466

Ibid. p.103 467

Ibid. p.101; p.103 468

Raymond Mortimer, 'New Novels' The New Statesman, 26/04/24 (1924) 68-69, p.69

151

The basis of many fantastic novels is the literalisation of metaphor, where the

impossible expressed in language takes place in reality – the opposite of what Apter

writes of the fantastic as ‘neither in the world of concrete images nor of abstractions,

but a middle ground in which literal language has an unreliable and unruly figurative

tendency.’469

Figurative language becomes literal in fantastic literature: ‘She’s a

vixen’, for example, becomes the plot of Lady into Fox; ‘She’s a witch’ that of Lolly

Willowes.

A Man in the Zoo is, on the other hand, effectively a literalisation of simile – that is,

there remains a distance between the objects being compared; a man becomes an

animal synecdochically, by taking on the same environment and restrictions, though

not form. This distance is eroded in metamorphosis, which is why Lady Into Fox is

akin to metaphor, retaining the impossibility inherent to metaphor, whereas A Man in

the Zoo equates with simile, which does not verbalise the impossible but rather makes

comparisons. Iain McGilchrist suggests that metaphor (meaning literally ‘to carry

across’) exists to make up for the gaps created by language itself:

Metaphor is language’s cure for the ills entailed on us by language […] If the

separation exists at the level of language, it does not at the level of experience.

At that level the two parts of a metaphor are not similar; they are the same.470

That is to say, the mental conception is the same for the object and subject of a

metaphor, and metaphor is the way of circumnavigating the linguistic distinction

between the two. Metamorphosis thus acts as the equivalent of metaphor because it

makes up for the shortcomings of physicality – that which McGilchrist terms

‘experience’ (how something is conceived, felt, and recognised, beyond language) is

469

Apter, Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality p.132 470

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western

World (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2010) p.116

152

the same, but corporeally there is difference; where metaphor closes this gap

linguistically, so metamorphosis closes it physically. Lakoff and Johnson suggest, in

Metaphors We Live By, that ‘our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we

both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature’, amongst which is the

‘ontological metaphor’ which gives ‘artificial boundaries’ and limits to concepts and

ideas, so that they can be understood and discussed.471

Metamorphosis is an

extension of this impulse to create limits, to the extent of effecting physical

boundaries, rather than conceptual ones.

Massey writes that:

Metamorphosis denies the primacy of language, which we are accustomed to

think of as the source and the medium of all change; here form changes directly

into another form, circumventing the process of conceptual translation that we

usually think of as necessary for the grasping and the effecting of change.472

Although fictional physical metamorphosis evades the supposed supremacy of

language as a novelistic tool for describing (and thus causing) change, it is however

synergetically tied to language as the model which allows the communication of

change. The metaphor exists as words, and though metamorphosis translates these

words into physicality, this can, in turn, only be told through language. Contrary to a

simile, there is nothing linguistically inherent in a metaphor to signal that it is not fact,

which permits it to be the object of metamorphosis: metaphors (like the fantastic)

depend upon perception, and a knowledge of natural laws.

471

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, IL; London: University of

Chicago Press, 2003) p.3; p.25 472

Massey, The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis p.51

153

Observer and observed

A Man in the Zoo, with its caged human and voyeuristic public, dramatises a wider

concern of the fantastic – the dynamics of observation. The complexities of

perspective are suggested as early as Ovid; the opening line of Metamorphoses being

‘In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas / corpora’ (‘My mind inspires me to speak

of forms changed into new bodies’).473

By opening with the concept of the mind, and

separating it from the changing bodies – physically placing ‘corpora’ on the second

line, relying on enjambment – Ovid introduces the differing functions of mind and

body and the distancing effect of relating a subjective viewpoint. Within

metamorphosis novels, the varying outlooks of the transformed being, the observer,

and the narrator create an interweaving framework of perspective, dependent upon the

authorial choice of focalisation. These distinctions are clearest in A Man in the Zoo,

where there is no question of loss of sentience or communication (as there are when a

human transmutes into animal or plant):

At that moment he was engaged in walking up and down (which occupation, by

the way, took up far more of his time than he ever suspected). […] Back and

forth he walked by the wire division, with his hands behind his back and his

head bent slightly, until he reached the corner, when up went his head and he

turned on his heel. His face was expressionless.474

John Cromartie is dehumanised when depicted from the observers’ viewpoint; his

face is described as ‘expressionless’, which really means that those who rely on visual

signs for elucidation (i.e. the crowd paying to see a man in the zoo) cannot form an

interpretive response. John becomes on a par with the animals either side of him –

perhaps worse, because a few pages later the narrator berates him for having

473

Quoted (with translation) in Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns p.75 474

Garnett, 'A Man in the Zoo (1924)' p.125

154

‘neglected ordinary civilities’ to these neighbours.475

The narrator, however, can

interpose in parenthesis, offering a discrepancy between his omniscience and John’s

(lack of) self-awareness (‘more of his time than he ever suspected’). Observation, as

subject and object, is a fundamental framework for the novel, and observation can be

a cause of change itself – both in the sexualisation of women, and in documenting the

non-fantastic metamorphosis undergone by Mr. Cromartie. Jackson’s idea that

metamorphosis novels relate to ‘undifferentiation’ through a refusal of ‘difference,

distinction, homogeneity, reduction, [and] discrete forms’476

is helpful for moments of

metamorphic insentience, as discussed, but belied by novels which do not entirely

eschew the formalities of narrative, and retain the dynamics of observer and observed.

This is not always dramatised to the extent of A Man in the Zoo, but is present in the

decision to focalise through either the metamorphosed individual, or a person

witnessing metamorphosis.

Flower Phantoms and Green Thoughts are primarily depicted from the aspect of the

human in metamorphosis. This permits the narrative to turn attention to questions of

self-knowledge and, more broadly, what ‘self’ is. Flower Phantoms does broach

ideas of hidden selfhood, as vocalised by Judy:

“It would be most interesting to find out what one meant, and what one wanted,

and what one was really like inside. I’m sure one contains the most queer

possibilities.”477

She phrases these philosophical and psychological questions in intentionally reductive

semantics, which undermine the purported scientific rigour of Freudianism, but also

demonstrates how fundamental these questions of identity are to the character. Judy

475

Ibid. p.132 476

Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion p.72 477

Fraser, Flower Phantoms p.18

155

experiments in ‘trying to see herself’,478

and her floral metamorphosis is an

outworking and embodiment (as it were) of these self-examinations. Her

metamorphosis is a blurring of consciousness and event: the act fulfils the thought,

particularly so because her metamorphosis is metonymic and foreshadowed by

imagery. As discussed above, Fraser depicts the insentience of Judy-as-plant through

an imprecise and occasionally obfuscatory prose, which reflects an uncertainty about

selfhood before and during metamorphosis which never comes to a linguistic

crystallisation.

Middlebrow audiences are perhaps less preoccupied by philosophical discussions of

selfhood than their highbrow counterparts – or, if this topic is approached, it is done

so obliquely (in Flower Phantoms), corporately (as with Lady Into Fox’s focus on

identity in marriage) or humorously, demonstrated by Green Thoughts:

A process analogous to the mutations of the embryo was being enacted here. At

last the entity which was thus being rushed down an absurdly foreshortened

vista of the ages arrived, slowing up, into the foreground. It became

recognizable. The Seven Ages of Mr. Mannering were presented, as it were, in

a series of close-ups, as in an educational film; his consciousness settled and

cleared; the bud was mature, ready to open. At this point, I believe, Mr.

Mannering’s state of mind was exactly that of a patient, who, struggling up

from vague dreams, wakening from under an anaesthetic, asks plaintively,

“Where am I?” Then the bud opened, and he knew.479

Collier plays on Mannering’s name with his Shakespearean reference, and clearly

presents the awakening of his consciousness comically, but this section also

exemplifies the complexities of perspective when depicting the transformation of the

mind.

478

Ibid. p.26 479

Collier, Green Thoughts p.31

156

Although Collier does not use the hazy distancing techniques favoured by Fraser,

Mannering’s evolving states of awareness are replicated and reflected by Collier’s

resistance of specificity until the final, short sentence of this excerpt. Similarly, the

vagueness of ‘entity’ and the pronoun ‘it’ are eventually exchanged for ‘he’, as part

(ironically) of the humanising process, as though the focalising camera were coming

into focus. And that camera (introduced in the image ‘as in an educational film’)

constructs the role of the observer. The dynamics of observation are first brought into

this excerpt by the word ‘recognizable’, which requires a cognisant onlooker – and

one willing to create a coherent narrative from the scene playing out in front of him.

This narrator/onlooker is voyeuristic, almost a detective, in assembling this account,

but not omniscient; a statement is qualified by ‘I believe’. The image of the

educational film concretises the idea of an observer, but this observing body, this

audience, is implicitly broad and anonymous. The educational film is only

incorporated as a simile, but it encourages the idea of an invested, but detached, act of

observation. As Virginia Woolf wrote in 1926 of people depicted on film, ‘we behold

them as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part of

it.’480

Reality (Woolf suggests films are ‘more real, or real with a different reality

from that which we perceive in daily life’481

) is distorted, even metamorphosed, into

referential recordings which remove the object from the subject – and thus the role of

observer is distorted accordingly.

Film was also, in 1936 when His Monkey Wife was published, a medium undergoing

change – capable, as H.D. wrote in 1930, of ‘including not only all art but including

480

Virginia Woolf, 'The Cinema (1926)' in Leonard Woolf (ed.) Collected Essays: Volume Two

(London: Chatto & Windus, 1972b) 268-272, p.269 481

Ibid. p.269

157

all life’,482

which is precisely the process of Mr. Mannering’s experience. H.D.’s

words are written in a pamphlet that discusses Kenneth Macpherson’s 1930 film

Borderline. In turn, he describes his decision to make the film with ‘a “subjective use

of inference”’: ‘By this I meant that instead of the method of externalised observation,

dealing with objects, I was going to take my film into the minds of the people in it’,

adding that this is ‘like something seen through a window or keyhole’.483

Access to

characters’ minds, of course, is one of the tenets of modernist writing, and his image

of eavesdropping is a familiar trope of domestic fiction, but by importing it to film,

Macpherson destabilises the dynamics of observer and observed. By introducing

educational film (which privileges the observer over the object, since the observer

becomes also the object of education) to the amalgam of superimposed and

overlapping imagery and levels of observation in his description of Mr. Mannering’s

metamorphosis, Collier further overdetermines the process of transformation, which

cannot be pinned down as either a subjective or objective experience – that is, neither

Mr. Mannering’s nor the observer’s perspectives can be resolved.

Although Desmond MacCarthy congratulates Garnett for ‘following out, not only

logically but emotionally, the minutest consequences of his preposterous fancy’,484

Lady Into Fox, of course, prioritises the observer’s emotions, rather than those of the

creature undergoing the ‘preposterous fancy’. This allows Garnett’s narrator to

presuppose and prioritise Mr. Tebrick’s responses and sensibilities when

482

H.D., 'Borderline: A POOL. film with Paul Robeson (1930)' in James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and

Laura Marcus (eds.) Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998) 221-236,

p.232 483

Kenneth Macpherson, 'As Is (1930)' in James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Jane Marcus (eds.)

Close Up 1927-1933 (London: Cassell, 1998) 236-238, p.236; p.238. This is a contrast to Woolf’s

anxiety, that cinema shows only the objects (Anna Karenina’s ‘teeth, her pearls and her velvet’) rather

than ‘the inside of her mind, her charm, her passion, her despair’). [Woolf, 'The Cinema (1926)' p.270] 484

MacCarthy, Criticism p.225

158

contemplating Mrs. Tebrick as both fox and woman. That is, the gradually altering

characteristics she demonstrates are detailed through an outsider’s eyes, so that there

is no exact analysis of the incremental change from lady to fox. Both sides of Mrs.

Tebrick’s development are documented with the partiality of a husband and the

amateur conclusions of a man not specialised in biology. So, while Garnett was

known to have researched the habits of foxes minutely,485

the observations which

intrude into the report by the seemingly detached narrator are those of a husband

clutching at straws for comprehension.

This narrator reports the husband’s viewpoint – but treads a curious line between

omniscience and the reverse. Despite relaying Mr. Tebrick’s unspoken thoughts –

‘One fancy came to him […] that it was his fault’; ‘Watching the two gave Mr.

Tebrick great delight’486

– the narrator also refuses absolute omniscience: ‘One point

indeed I have not been able to ascertain and that is how they first became

acquainted.’487

This moment of silence lends weight to the purported stance of

biographer, despite not cohering with the narrator’s otherwise psychic abilities.

Although the narrative does describe the Tebricks as more like ‘lovers’ than spouses,

the period in which they were lovers is undocumented. By obscuring their courtship

in this way, Garnett denies the reader the opportunity of comparing the couple before

and during marriage – a comparison which, more generally, some reviewers regarded

as essential to an interpretation of the novel, and its presentation of the contrast

between expectation and actuality in marriage:

485

Ann S. Johnson, 'Garnett's Amazon from Dahomey: Literary Debts in "The Sailor's Return"'

Contemporary Literature, 14/2 (1973) 169-185, p.173 486

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.6; p.46 487

Ibid. p.3

159

You may say to yourself, “Why should I, a reasonable person, read such

nonsense, which has nothing to do with real life?” But I wonder if it hasn’t

something to do with real life. I seem to have heard of husbands who felt after

their marriage that their wives had changed into something as different from the

girls they married as a vixen is from a lady.488

By focusing upon the feelings and thoughts of man observing metamorphosis, Garnett

offers a parallel for the husband bewildered by the woman they married – a

bewilderment reflected by this reviewer’s vague use of ‘I wonder’, ‘I seem to have

heard’, and ‘something as different’, rather than any precise parallels or statements.

In the same way that Mr. Tebrick must rely upon documenting his wife’s physical

transformation and the observable outworking of it, without access to her

psychological metamorphosis, so spouses are never entirely comprehendible to their

partner. Marriages between equals (as sexual progressiveness was gradually

revealing spouses to be) encounter the obstruction of an inability to know all from

mere visual scrutiny.

Where Lady Into Fox uses metamorphosis to enact this marital confusion, A Man in

the Zoo uses the framework of metamorphosis, non-fantastically, as a response to

discord in a relationship. In both cases, though, the transformation is not isolated.

Metamorphosis creates a wider pattern of change; it is almost contagious. This is

dramatised in A Man in the Zoo, where (from John Cromartie’s perspective), the

‘staring faces of a crowd […] seemed to share all the qualities of those apes’.489

Observers and observed blend in animalistic imagery, dehumanising both sides of the

viewing act, and creating a narrative microcosm of the model Todorov asserts for the

488

Sunday Chronicle (17/12/22), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/25 (Press Cuttings vol.23, 1922),

University of Reading. 489

Garnett, 'A Man in the Zoo (1924)' p.146

160

critic (as opposed to the structuralist), changing to ‘constitute himself as [the] subject’

of the novel under examination.490

For Mr. Tebrick, examining Silvia and attempting to understand her metamorphosis

gradually leads to his own de-evolution. As the narrative suggests:

We know her husband was always trying to bring her back to be a woman, or at

any rate to get her to act like one, may she not have been hoping to get him to

be like a beast himself or to act like one? May she not have thought it easier to

change him thus than ever to change herself back into being a woman?491

The distinction between acting and being encompasses the fantastic and non-fantastic

transformations in the novel, and coheres with the middlebrow anxiety about ‘keeping

up appearances’ (as portrayed in Rose Macaulay’s novel of that name, where Daisy

Simpson adopts a sophisticated persona so completely that the narrative gives her two

names: acting and being have overlapped.) By conflating the two, Garnett makes Mr.

Tebrick’s de-humanisation equal with Silvia’s metamorphosis, even without complete

physical change. His transformation is presaged early in the novel:

Indeed the extremity of his grief was such that it served him a very good turn,

for he was so entirely unmanned by it that for some time he could do nothing

but weep[.]492

With the metaphorical ‘unmanned’, Lady Into Fox begins the process of de-

humanising Mr. Tebrick; the term suggests a form of reverse evolution, or unravelling

of life. There is also the implication of emasculation, often attendant to interwar

discussions of woman’s evolving sexuality493

– and also pertinent to a battle where

490

Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre p.142 491

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.39 492

Ibid. p.30 493

For example, Anthony Ludovici comes to the odd conclusion in Lysistrata (the title taken from a

play by Aristophanes, in which Lysistrata encourages the withholding of sex from men, to end a war)

161

the wife is more successful in changing the husband than he reverting her. The

linguistic encroachment upon Mr. Tebrick’s humanity continues through metaphors

which portray him as an animal – but, since common expressions, not jarringly so: he

‘fell into a dog’s sleep’; Mrs. Cork thinks the house is a ‘pigstye’ [sic].494

This

coalesces into the framing of Mr. Tebrick as ‘a beast’, shortly before the potential

bestiality incident:

He got up to catch her then and finding himself unsteady on his legs, he went

down on to all fours. The long and short of it is that by drinking he drowned all

his sorrow; and then would be a beast too like his wife[.]495

Mr. Tebrick’s behaviour leads to a physical change, although not an irreversible one,

whereby he takes on the posture of an animal (drunkenness also forms a parallel beast

in Green Thoughts, when Mr. Mannering’s inebriated nephew is ‘a fiend in human

shape’).496

Garnett’s unusual use of ‘would be’ suggests two possible interpretations;

either a slightly jarring modal verb, which confuses the tense of the sentence (perhaps

intended to reflect his drunkenness), or an archaic synonym for ‘wanted to be’,

hinting at a subjunctive mode. This linguistic uncertainty around Mr. Tebrick’s

desires augments his increasing animalism, and thus the impenetrability of his

intentions.

The epithet ‘beast’, to refer to sexual aggression or indecency, relates to the theme of

sexualised men in 1920s Sheik-esque exoticised literature which is domesticated in

these novels. It is seen again in His Monkey Wife when Amy accuses Mr. Fatigay of

that women will take over the world, and ‘the female domain will steadily corrode and eat into the

male, and soon men will cease to be employers altogether, and become the poorest-paid workers in an

industry run entirely by women.’ [Anthony M. Ludovici, Lysistrata: or Woman's Future and Future

Woman (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1924) p.86] 494

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.58; p.38 495

Ibid. pp.35f 496

Collier, Green Thoughts p.52

162

‘“behav[ing] like a brute beast”’, adding, with a phrase almost identical to that used in

Mr. Tebrick’s (possible) bestiality scene, that she ‘“shall never forget the side of your

nature you’ve shown me tonight”’.497

Throughout both novels, the term ‘nature’ acts

as a pivot for the characters’ transformations. Mr. Tebrick says that he has ‘as much

natural obstinacy’ as Silvia, and the cubs she later bears ‘look on [Mr. Tebrick] as

their natural companion.498

Since these novels question what is natural and unnatural

– both fantastically and maritally – the word takes on an ironic element, and is

precluded from representing any absolute standard.

Paul Theroux comments of His Monkey Wife that ‘[i]t is the humans in the book who

behave like monkeys, gibbering and indulging their frivolous passion for fancy

dress.’499

This commensurately describes Amy’s character, but Mr. Fatigay is

animalised in a less flippant fashion: he becomes destitute, gnawing at a cauliflower

stump in a doorway, with ‘a monkey-chatter of teeth in his head.’500

This metaphor

overtly places Mr. Fatigay on the same level as Emily, dehumanising him to her

standing. Similarly, Mr. Tebrick gradually adopts the traits of an animal – or, more

accurately, loses those of a civilised human. He ceases to wash, his ‘cheeks were

sunk in, his eyes hollow but excessively brilliant’, and his ‘reason is gone’.501

When

in this state, he is returned to his wife, but taking on a role closer to beast than man:

Mr. Tebrick now could follow after them anywhere and keep up with them too,

and could go through a wood as silently as a deer. He learnt to conceal himself

if ever a labourer passed by so that he was rarely seen, and never but once in

their company. But what was most strange of all, he had got a way of going

497

Collier, His Monkey Wife: or, Married to a Chimp p.147 498

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.33; p.86 499

Theroux, Introduction to Collier, His Monkey Wife: or, Married to a Chimp p.x 500

Ibid. p.226 501

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.63

163

doubled up, often almost on all fours with his hands touching the ground every

now and then, particularly when he went uphill.502

Silvia’s fantastic metamorphosis has been replicated in Mr. Tebrick’s physical,

psychological, and social metamorphoses. This reflects the co-dependence of

identity, whereby personal identity is subsumed by corporate identity, even (or

especially) in the microcosm of marriage – when change in the status or mores of the

wife engenders a transformation in the husband.

Silvia’s eventual evolution in Lady Into Fox, alongside her immediate physical

metamorphosis and gradual psychological metamorphosis, is the transition from

tameness to wildness. As the last vestige of her humanity disappears, so her

resistance to the house increases. Tameness and wildness, as well as being

behavioural, are defined by the boundaries they inhabit: tameness belongs within and

in accordance with domestic space, while wildness refuses to be restrained by these

boundaries. Complicating this dichotomy, however, is the fact that the house itself,

however, is not a static entity in Lady Into Fox – like Mr. Tebrick, it is affected by

Silvia’s metamorphosis.

Metamorphosis of the domestic

The standards of domestic propriety are, as discussed, shaken by the lady turning into

a fox, but that is not the only domestic disturbance. The domestic fantastic always

disrupts the space, and use of space, in which the strange occurs. Laura Willowes

must leave the oppressive home of her brother and negotiate a relationship with the

countryside cottage she rents; Leonard Eyles identifies the ‘slow decay of the house’

502

Ibid. pp.86f

164

in Appius and Virginia; Orlando experiments with living alongside gipsies and

fancies of the rooms of her colossal house, ‘hundreds and thousands of times as she

had seen them, they never looked the same twice’.503

These houses are all altered –

naturally or supernaturally – by the presence of the fantastic.

Judy’s unusual nature (which leads to her metamorphosis) is compounded early in

Flower Phantoms by her sitting alone on the landing; her brother asks “Why don’t

you use rooms like ordinary people?”504

He later adds:

“Sensible people do not sit on landings gazing at ferns in a window. They sit in

rooms. That is what rooms are for. Or, if it is summer, in gardens. That is

what gardens are for.”505

The misuse of space is an affront to conventionality, and (by extension) an indication

of the latent fantastic. Her metamorphosis (like that in Green Thoughts) takes place

in the alternative space of the hot-house, liminally between house and nature – but

belonging properly to neither. The situating of the fantastic often takes place in an

alternative living space, as shall be explored in my conclusion, but Marina Warner

suggests that it is particularly pertinent for ‘tales of metamorphosis’ which

often arose in spaces (temporal, geographical, and mental) that were crossroads,

cross-cultural zones, points of interchange on the intricate connective tissue of

communications between cultures.506

This universalisable concept finds its domestic microcosm in these novels and their

use of alternative spaces – another facet which is heightened in A Man in the Zoo,

with its faux-domestic scene and subversion of the traditional home.

503

Leonora Eyles, 'Review of Appius and Virginia' Times Literary Supplement, 07/07/32 (1932) p.496;

Woolf, Orlando pp.301f 504

Fraser, Flower Phantoms p.11 505

Ibid. p.28 506

Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds p.17

165

The vitiation of the home is signalled in Lady Into Fox when Silvia tears apart a

rabbit: ‘Blood on the carpet, blood on the armchairs and antimacassars, even a little

blood spurtled on to the wall’.507

The blood spattered around the room echoes a wider

metamorphosis, as the house (and its concomitant values) are transformed; this gory

destruction of décor is the visual manifestation of a fundamental shift. In this way it

is the inverse equivalent of Silvia; her form changes, followed by the gradual

unwinding of her nature; contrarily, the house’s dynamics alter immediately, and its

physical cleanliness and order are gradually ruined. While Silvia besmirches the

walls and destroys clothing and objects, Mr. Tebrick correspondingly starts to shut off

rooms of the house – having initially lied about doing so to his neighbours – until the

Tebricks are living in only ‘three or four’ increasingly ‘dirty and disorderly rooms’.508

These concrete spatial restrictions give the novel a growing claustrophobia, mirroring

Silvia’s physical entrapment and increasing wildness, but through a lens with which

the reader can identify.

As Silvia loses her tameness, so she begins to fight against this claustrophobia – by

contravening the boundaries orchestrated within the house and garden. The home

represents both security and entrapment. Silvia starts to explore the inaccessible (to

Mr. Tebrick) by hiding under the table, or in the middle of a frozen pond. Eventually

she resorts to burrowing under the fence, transgressing the essential domestic

boundary and escaping to the wild – where Mr. Tebrick later joins her, far beyond the

confines of the home. Ironically, in another of his personal reversals, at the end of

the novel Mr. Tebrick himself makes many holes in the domestic boundaries, hacking

507

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.29 508

Ibid. p.9; p.22; p.74

166

at the hedge – intending that Silvia and her litter will escape into ‘the security of the

garden’,509

and away from the hounds. Instead, it is in the garden that Silvia is killed.

The home has metamorphosed from a site of security into a site of danger, and the

essential qualities of the domestic are undermined. This is the final indication that the

norms of home and marriage have been subverted.

In Lady Into Fox, it is the fantastic moment which causes narrative dilemmas – which,

in turn, reveal similar complications in the world beyond the novel. Many domestic

fantastic novels use the fantastic to dramatise a (would-be) solution to the social

anxiety, however flawed. This is the format for Lolly Willowes and creation novels

The Love-Child and The Venetian Glass Nephew, and even in those narratives which

use metamorphosis as an attempt to escape – from Ovid’s Daphne to Ronald Fraser’s

Judy. In reversing this relationship, Garnett avoids any sense that Lady Into Fox acts

as wish-fulfilment or improvises an impossible panacea. By dismantling an

‘ordinary’ marriage, and witnessing the result of this escalating model of disruption,

Garnett dramatises the act of societal crisis (if that is not too strong a word for the re-

defining of roles in sex and marriage) rather than answering it.

509

Ibid. p.88

167

Chapter Four

“Creative Thought Creates”: 510

Childlessness and Creation Narratives

The counterpart of changing constituents of reality through metamorphosis is

identifying those elements which are absent, and creating them. Creation narratives

are as old as narratives themselves, and the act of narration is, of course, itself one of

creation. Any excursion into the fantastic must involve a further element of creation,

since transgressing or adding to extant natural laws requires the construction of new

(or renewed) possibilities. The creation of humans, however, produces a separate

category of the fantastic; the manufacture of life responds to more fundamental

emotional impetuses, and raises more complex philosophical and theological

questions, than other manifestations of the creative force. Edith Olivier’s The Love-

Child, Elinor Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew,511

and (though with a different

tone) Frank Baker’s Miss Hargreaves demonstrate a new, distinctly middlebrow,

approach to the fantastic creation of humans, and the anxieties of childlessness and

powerlessness this act of creation both responds to, and causes.

Fantasy theorists (even among those who present schemata of classifications) seldom

designate a category for the fantastic creation of humans – although, with a broad

view, The Love-Child, The Venetian Glass Nephew, and Miss Hargreaves correspond

with Kathryn Hume’s category ‘literature of vision’: that which introduces new

510

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.223 511

Olivier and Wylie were longstanding friends, and read each other’s creation narratives (Wylie told

Olivier that The Love-Child was ‘beautifully done, & the idea is enchanting’, while Olivier described

The Venetian Glass Nephew as ‘beautiful, brittle and tragic’) but there seems little evidence that they

influenced one another in this regard. [Elinor Wylie, 'Letter to Edith Olivier' (18/06/27), Chippenham,

Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Edith Olivier Papers 982/94; Olivier, Without Knowing Mr.

Walkley: Personal Memories p.254]

168

realities, in order to draw contrasts between the work and the world.512

Even writers

whose primary approach to fantasy theory depends upon dividing up elements of

fantastic narratives, such as Peter Penzoldt, oddly avoid creation as a theme.513

The

creation narrative is, however, far from a twentieth-century invention. Genesis and

other religious accounts notwithstanding, the sphere of myths and fairy-tales has long

been fascinated with supernaturally creating people – from Pinocchio (created by

Carlo Collodi in 1883) to the Russian fairy-tale ‘Snegurochka’ (The Snow Maiden’),

available in the 1920s through Arthur Ransome’s retelling, ‘The Little Daughter of

Snow’, in Old Peter’s Russian Tales.514

(The influence of ‘The Snow Maiden’ can be

seen as recently as 2012, in Eowyn Ivey’s novel The Snow Child. Ivey replays the

narrative in a manner strikingly similar to The Love-Child – focusing on the pain of

childlessness, and the emotions of a creator pseudo-parent: ‘It was fantastical and

impossible, but Mable knew it was true – she and Jack had formed her of snow and

birch boughs and frosty wild grass. The truth awed her. Not only was the child a

miracle, but she was their creation. One does not create a life and then abandon it to

the wilderness.’515

) Yet perhaps the most familiar creation fiction for a 1920s

audience was still Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), by then also popularised

through stage and screen.516

512

Since Hume does not distinguish between fantastic and non-fantastic texts, instead viewing all

literature as composite of fantastic and mimetic impulses, it is necessarily imprecise to assign

manifestations of the fantastic (such as creation narratives) to her four categories of literature (those of

illusion, vision, revision and disillusion). [Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in

Western Literature p.55] 513

Although Penzoldt has separate categories for werewolves, witches, ghosts etc., the novel of

fantastic creation could only really be grouped in the vaguer classification he designates ‘The

Psychological Ghost Story’. His definition doesn’t include anything particularly ghostlike, since the

mere possibility of madness or even unreliable narration appears to be sufficient. ‘It replaces the

traditional objective approach to the supernatural, in which the public has long ceased to believe, by a

subjective approach, and thus prevents its complete disappearance from fiction.’ [Penzoldt, The

Supernatural in Fiction p.56] 514

Arthur Ransome, Old Peter's Russian Tales (London: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1916) 222-235. 515

Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child (London: Headline Review, 2012) p.90 516

Although the famous 1931 film starring Boris Karloff was yet to be made, Peggy Webling’s play

(from which the film was adapted) was performed in 1927, and the twentieth century had already seen

169

Frankenstein: the modern creation novel

Commonly seen as a founding novel of science-fiction, the central elements of

Frankenstein can also be recognised in interwar novels which explore the creation of

humans through non-scientific means. The popularity of Frankenstein is perhaps

reflected in Roger Callois’ description of creation as a category, in Images, Images:

‘the statue, figure, suit of armour, or automaton that suddenly comes to life and

acquires a deadly independence’.517

Callois incorporates deadliness/terror into the

definition, integrating a purportedly unalterable readerly response into the trope itself.

Twentieth-century middlebrow examples play with this formula and, by doing so,

repudiate it. While the struggle for independence remains prominent in The Love-

Child, The Venetian Glass Nephew, and Miss Hargreaves, none of the creations

follow Frankenstein’s Monster’s lead in turning murderous. As with the creaking

Gothic mansion’s metamorphosis into an innocuous country house, so the fearsome

creature of uncanny terror becomes no less uncanny, but significantly less terrifying,

in being domesticated.

Shelley recognised the placement of Frankenstein as a creation narrative within a

chronology of gradually de-mythologised frameworks. By subtitling Frankenstein

‘the modern Prometheus’, she overtly compares a mythological creator518

with the

two film adaptations of Frankenstein. Donawerth notes the influence of Frankenstein on other writers

of the period: ‘In the 1920s and 1930s, allusions to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein occur in Clare Winger

Harris's "The Artificial Man" (1929), Sophie Wenzel Ellis's "Creatures of the Light" (1930); Kathleen

Ludwick's "Dr. Immortelle" (1930) and L. Taylor Hansen's "The City on the Cloud" (1930).’ [Jane

Donawerth, Frankenstein's Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction (1st ed. edn.; Syracuse, NY:

Syracuse University Press, 1997) p.xviii] 517

Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre pp.100f (Todorov is

paraphrasing Callois’ work, which has not itself been translated into English.) 518

Although Prometheus is traditionally depicted as bringing fire to mankind, some versions of the

myth (notably in Ovid’s Metamorphoses) establish him as the creator of man.

170

intelligent but otherwise quotidian figure of Frankenstein. In alluding to a shared

classical heritage, Shelley pre-empts not only Miss Hargreaves (‘“Pygmalion couldn’t

have done better”’519

) and the middlebrow desire to respond to literary antecedents,

but also Freud’s popularisation of classical figures, such as Oedipus and Electra, as

modernised universal tropes. By bringing the power and significance of a Titan to an

ordinary man, Shelley anticipates novels like Baker’s and Olivier’s, which posit the

creation of humans in determinedly ordinary environments. Although the narratives

in question do not overtly acknowledge their debt to Shelley, Olivier does literally

domesticate Frankenstein elsewhere, criticising sprawling suburban houses as ‘a

jungle of Frankenstein monsters compacted of bricks and mortar.’520

Rather than

comparing her own novel to this archetype, she sees the suburbs as the twentieth-

century equivalent, with the same associations of not only ugliness but danger and a

lack of control.

Mary Shelley sets a precedent for several common traits of middlebrow creation

narratives: fantastic events amongst the everyday; the humanisation and pathos of a

creation (Rosemary Jackson calls Frankenstein the ‘first of many fantasies re-

deploying a Faustian tale on a fully human level521

), and an interactive relationship

between creator and created. Where Frankenstein differs from the novels which

inherit its legacy is in the meditation and mediation of creation itself. The creators’

methods of and motivations for acts of creation distance the domestic fantastic

updating of Frankenstein from that text. Both method and motivation are instead

informed and shaped largely by the interwar issue of spinsterhood and childlessness.

519

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.58 520

Edith Olivier, Country Moods and Tenses: A Non-Grammarian's Chapbook (London: B.T. Batsford,

1941) p.21 521

Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion p.55

171

The statistic for unmarried women in Britain (although 1.75m according to the 1921

census522

) was widely expressed, journalistically and otherwise, as two million

‘surplus women’. Although spinsterhood was scarcely a new phenomenon,523

it was

treated almost as an epidemic: ‘we must for a time resign ourselves to a surplus

female population’, as one commentator wrote in 1927.524

On the one hand, this

phenomenon led to the cult of the flapper, feared by conservative contemporaries (in

appalled works such as John MacArthur’s Shall Flappers Rule?) and often celebrated

by feminist critics.525

But this is a skewed image of the single woman’s life, which

was frequently not so much emancipated as socially emaciated. A large percentage of

this ‘surplus female population’ were middle-class and middlebrow, or at least they

suffered the accompanying restrictive lifestyle and stigmatization which went with

being unmarried, where other classes might not. This is partly because, as well-

documented, women of the middle-class were often brought up almost solely for

marriage (novels including Delafield’s Thank Heaven Fasting and Rachel Ferguson’s

Alas, Poor Lady demonstrate the insufficiency of middle-class girls’ upbringing for an

unmarried future) and partly because the term ‘spinster’526

was self-perpetuating as a

522

Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First

World War (London: Penguin, 2007) p.xiii 523

Sheila Jeffreys notes that, of census years, it was actually 1911 which saw the ‘peak for the number

of women in each age group from 25 upwards who remained single’. [Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and

Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880-1930 (London: Pandora, 1985) p.88] 524

Haldane, Motherhood and its Enemies p.136 525

John MacArthur, Shall Flappers Rule? A Revolutionary Proposal, and its Dangers to Men (London:

Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1927), quoted in Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived

Without Men After the First World War p.32; see, for further discussion of the role of the flapper,

Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs pp.1-40 526

Popularity of the term ‘spinster’ was, to some extent, changing in the period. Marjorie Hillis even

suggested that ‘spinster’, as a label, was ‘rapidly becoming extinct – or, at least, being relegated to

another period, like the bustle and reticule.’ It is unlikely that Hillis’ optimistic statement carried a

great deal of generalisable truth in 1936 (when her book was published) and it certainly did not a

decade earlier – although, Mary Scharlieb’s title The Bachelor Woman and Her Problems was chosen

partly in recognition that amongst those she asked, ‘one or two ladies were very unwilling to accept the

old-world appellation of “spinster”’. [Hillis, Live Alone and Like It pp.22f; Mary Scharlieb, The

Bachelor Woman and Her Problems (London: Williams & Norgate, 1929) p.14]

172

word generally understood to refer only to the higher social classes, and their morality

which required celibacy of the unmarried woman. As Freewoman magazine pointed

out before the First World War, ‘[a]mong the very poor there is no spinster difficulty,

because the very poor do not remain spinsters.’527

Contemporary opinion covered a

spectrum from considering spinsters ‘a large body of active, intelligent single

women’528

to the ‘barren sister, the withered tree’,529

but whether considered

positively or negatively, there is a sense that this ‘two million’ are a group set apart in

some way. Their lives are viewed as being outside the peripheries of normal, natural

reality;530

indeed, Rachel Ferguson claims of the spinster that ‘no rudesby of a wind

of reality has ever blown upon her or ever will’.531

It is a logical step for authors to

explore spinsters’ own development of unreality; they are perfectly situated for the

fantastic, and its kinship with those set apart and somehow either inaccessible or

themselves unable to connect fully with non-fantastic life.

‘A rather muddled magic’: (lack of) method in the domestic fantastic

The principal difference between the creation process within Frankenstein and that in

interwar middlebrow creation narratives is that the latter is no longer primarily

scientific. When approaching his creative act, Frankenstein declares that ‘natural

philosophy, and particularly chemistry […] became nearly my sole occupation.’532

This is, to some extent, the model used in the formation of Virginio – whose name

obviously suggests purity – from glass in The Venetian Glass Nephew (although even

527

'One', 'The Spinster' The Freewoman, 1/1 (1911) 10-11, pp.10f 528

Laura Hutton, The Single Woman and Her Emotional Problems (London: Ballière, Tindall & Cox,

1935) p.1 529

'One', 'The Spinster' p.10 530

Charlotte Haldane classifies women into six categories, the first two of which are ‘the sexually

normal’, and ‘the originally normal, doomed to permanent virginity’. [Haldane, Motherhood and its

Enemies p.157] 531

Ferguson, Passionate Kensington p.68 532

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (London: Penguin, 1818 repr.2000) p.48

173

in this instance, a contemporary review labels it ‘a rather muddled magic’,533

which

doesn’t mind too much about courting authenticity or reader’s credulity in the manner

of Frankenstein’s laboured precision.) In The Love-Child and Miss Hargreaves,

creation is not the result of an external, methodical experiment, but an accidental

externalisation of the creator’s internal being, and in the case of Miss Hargreaves, this

imaginative act is compared to various artistic endeavours (‘a composer or a poet or a

painter’534

) rather than a scientific undertaking. The connection between creativity

and knowledge is replaced by that between creativity and artistry, spontaneity, and

self. The semantics of science become those of desire and projection, avoiding the

elaborate and esoteric mechanisms of science-fiction and remaining within the

identifiable emotions of the middlebrow home.

As discussed earlier, both Clarissa’s existence, and the identification of her as

Agatha’s ‘love child’, are described in semantics which owe a great deal to the

parlance of Freudianism:

A name shot across her consciousness, like something suddenly alive –

Clarissa!535

“A love child.” The phrase had surged up from her inner consciousness[.]536

Agatha is an involuntary servant of her unconscious; she is the equivalent of a

fantastic novelist within the narrative, creating the fantastic from the resources of her

mind – but one following the analysis of T.E. Apter that fantastic literature ‘often

533

Sir John Knewstub Maurice Rothenstein, 'Review of The Venetian Glass Nephew' Times Literary

Supplement, 22/04/26 (1926) p.300 534

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.76 535

Olivier, The Love-Child p.13 536

Ibid. p.68.

174

leaves the impression that the work has not been executed under conscious control’.537

Although there has been no dearth of Freudian readings of Frankenstein,538

these

restrict themselves to Frankenstein’s motivations and responses, rather than his

method of generating life. Rather than creating unwittingly, Frankenstein is

extremely conscious about his act of creation – even if not of its aftermath. The

process is exhaustingly thorough, the very opposite of an unconscious accident:

Some miracle might have produced it, yet the stages of the discovery were

distinct and probable. After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I

succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became

myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.539

‘Distinct and probable’ describes the very antithesis of the process in The Love-Child,

which is deliberately hazy in relation to Clarissa’s appearance. Although power

becomes a vital dynamic later in the narrative, as will be addressed, at the point of

creation Agatha is powerless – that is to say, Agatha has no conscious power at this

point – reflecting the (figurative and literal) disenfranchisement of spinsters in the

1920s, and more particularly the lack of control they could have over their inability to

have children. This method of creation (or lack of method) is particularly appropriate

537

Apter, Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality p.4. The ‘marks of unconscious processes’

Apter identifies are ‘timelessness, fragmentation, mutual contradiction, exaggeration, distortion,

displacement, [and] condensation’ (p.4). Shelley and Olivier give curiously similar accounts of their

moments of creative epiphany; Shelley wrote that at night she had a ‘waking dream’: ‘My imagination,

unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a

vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie’, while Olivier also documents having sudden

inspiration ‘in the middle of the night […] I wrote practically the whole of that first book during those

feverish wakeful hours when the body is weary but the mind seems to let loose to work abnormally

quickly.’ [Mary Shelley, '1831 Preface' Frankenstein (London: Penguin Books, 2000) 19-25, p.21;

Olivier, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley: Personal Memories p.290]. It is ironic, given Frankenstein’s

methodical creation activity, that Shelley should describe her own creative process in a manner so

prophetic of twentieth-century psychoanalytic discourses of the unconscious. 538

For example, Joseph Kestner, 'Narcissism as Symptom and Structure: The Case of Mary Shelley's

Frankenstein' in Fred Botting (ed.) Frankenstein (New Casebooks; Hampshire and London:

Macmillan, 1995) 68-80; Richard Brockman, 'Freud, Frankenstein, and the Art of Loss' The

Psychoanalytic Review, 97/5 (2010) 819-833 539

Shelley, Frankenstein p.50

175

in response to an anxiety about the loss of agency. Clarissa’s appearance is, in some

ways, a supernatural gift – but it is not one which grants the unwitting creator control.

The actual appearances of Clarissa and Miss Hargreaves, in their respective

narratives, are not scheduled, nor do they in fact occur at the same instance as their

unconscious and inadvertent creation. When Norman invents Miss Hargreaves, in an

attempt to extricate himself from an awkward conversation, he is initially only semi-

consciously aware of the act:

‘“A lady,” I corrected sharply. For one second I paused. Then, “Miss

Hargreaves,” I said. “Miss – Connie Hargreaves,” I added.

It seemed to me there was a sort of stirring of air in the church, like – like what?

Rather like someone opening a very old umbrella.’540

The image of the umbrella is domestic and almost whimsical, but could scarcely be

described as the climax of creation. It is not for some time (and some chapters) that

Miss Hargreaves actually appears in person. In The Love-Child, Clarissa’s eventual

materialisation is not an immediate outworking of the unconscious, directly related to

a moment of concentration or longing. Instead, she appears whilst Agatha is engaged

in a different creative, domestic, and loosely religious task.

Then one day, when Agatha was quietly sitting on the white seat at the end of

the green walk, darning a black woollen stocking to wear in church the next

day, and for once more absorbed in darning than in dreaming – then, all of a

sudden, Clarissa came and sat on the seat beside her.541

Just as reading takes place for Delafield’s Provincial Lady in the midst of everyday

activities, so Clarissa’s fantastic appearance is naturalised by interrupting a

540

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.17 541

Olivier, The Love-Child p.25

176

commonplace task. The environment is described with stark adjectives, blocking out

the colour of the scene as though it were a Cubist painting, or (more aptly) a

background waiting for a foreground image. The dichotomy between darning and

dreaming – between the tediously everyday and the limitlessly imaginative – is drawn

together neatly in the figure of Clarissa, who has aspects of both. As David Cecil

writes in a later edition of The Love-Child, ‘She is like a real girl, but just a touch

more elfin and elusive: there is no difficulty in believing that a stranger accepted her

as a genuine human being.’542

She is harmonious with the home, yet occupies the

liminal space between real and not-real.

Blurring the line between creator and created

Clarissa’s genesis departs from the idea of a detached, external creation (in the mould

of Frankenstein), and destabilises the dynamic of creator and created at opposite ends

of a creation process. As a projection from Agatha’s consciousness, Clarissa is

necessarily a product of Agatha’s self and her personality. Although they are

physically discrete, the relationship between Agatha and Clarissa is comparable to the

shifting relationship between Silvia’s human and fox psychological characteristics:

Agatha and Clarissa are not psychologically separable, and there is no apparatus for

quantifying where one ends and the other begins. Indeed, Agatha does not only create

an ‘other’ from her self, she learns about aspects of her self from the qualities she has

unwittingly granted Clarissa. For the woman with no concept of what motherhood is

actually like, the situation of The Love-Child is an exaggerated version of an extant

dream. Creation is both projection and idealisation, using the spinster’s fantasy of the

542

David Cecil, Introduction to Edith Olivier, The Love Child (London: The Richards Press, 1927

repr.1951) 3-9, p.5. As a friend wrote to Olivier, ‘Clarissa is exactly what anyone created for

“families” would be. Quite real – not a bit a ghost or a fairy, & yet never an ordinary human.’

[Morrison, 'Letter to Edith Olivier' ]

177

perfect mother/daughter relationship: that of two selves which both reflect and

complement each other and fuse into one whole. Clarissa is greedy, and Agatha

‘remembered with some embarrassment that food had once been her own secret

delight’;543

Clarissa can dance, where Agatha cannot; Clarissa reads books which

Agatha had longed to read as a child:

But she sometimes thought that Clarissa was cleverer than she had been: indeed,

she often seemed to excel just where Agatha herself had often failed.544

The personalities of creator and created are interwoven, and the lines of reflection are

unclear: in some facets, Clarissa is Agatha’s complementary opposite; in others, she is

the fulfilment of Agatha’s unrealised personality and her dissatisfaction with her own

childhood. This is dramatised less precisely in The Venetian Glass Nephew, where

the child is created from glass rather than from the unconscious and thus has a less

obvious psychological connection with his creator. But Virginio is still envisioned by

Peter Innocent as a ‘younger, fairer, […] more perfect’ version of himself, hoping

‘“that my dear nephew might find a conclusive felicity in the charitable embrace of

the church, as I have done.”’545

Peter Innocent thus hopes his ‘offspring’ will be a

better version of the person he is himself, without swaying far from the path he has

travelled. His creation thesis is aspirational, and yet unimaginative and restrictive –

and ultimately doomed not to succeed; with this aspiration, every development

Virginio makes when alive is, effectively, an act of fading from this vision, like the

basic building plans for a house which will inevitably be distorted when built.

543

Olivier, The Love-Child p.31 544

Ibid. p.142; pp.53f; p.61 545

Wylie, The Venetian Glass Nephew p.22; p.129

178

Like the dual Golyadkins in Dostoevsky’s The Double, Agatha and Clarissa often

have inversely proportional qualities – but whilst Dostoevsky’s pairing is

antagonistic, Olivier’s are largely harmonious. The creation narrative is one of the

ways in which the middlebrow manipulates the doubling subgenre, rather than a

straightforward tale of doppelgangers.546

One of Olivier’s friends, Lady Juliet Duff,

wrote to her on publication of The Love-Child that it was ‘very clever to make the

lady herself so unattractive – all the beauty and grace that was in her having gone to

the making of the child.547

It is unlikely that this was entirely Olivier’s intention

(Agatha is, in some ways, ‘attractive’, and not the ‘disagreeable women of advanced

years’548

sardonically suggested by Rose Macaulay as the definition of a spinster) but

Duff’s letter indicates an early readerly awareness of Agatha and Clarissa’s fused

personalities, particularly in relation to intangible and unquantifiable qualities.

Agatha’s ‘beauty and grace’ – perhaps more accurately her liveliness – have not ‘gone

to’ the moment of creation, but rather that creation illuminates the loss of personality

she has already experienced over the years. On the first page, for instance, Olivier

writes of Agatha that ‘her hat was quite without character’.549

This is essentially a

synecdochical portrait; Agatha is, by association, characterless, a vacuum waiting to

be filled – thus leaving room for new character, and a new character.

The same vacuum is apparent in the space of the home. The absent child precludes

the ideal household; the house is, by this absence, made strange. In The Love-Child,

546

Middlebrow narratives seldom use doppelgangers – instead, they incorporate secret dual identities

(Rose Macaulay’s Keeping Up Appearances; E.F. Benson’s Secret Lives; Monica Dickens’ Joy and

Josephine) or similar tropes, to use the traits of doubling without reproducing Dostoevsky, Stevenson,

or others who play with identity in this way. 547

Lady Juliet Duff, 'Letter to Edith Olivier' (27/07/27), Chippenham, Wiltshire and Swindon History

Centre, Edith Olivier Papers 982/94 548

Rose Macaulay, A Casual Commentary (London: Methuen, 1925) p.120 549

Olivier, The Love-Child p.9

179

‘the presence of a child in the house was just what was wanted’.550

Although this is

from the servants’ perspective, the passive voice expands the need to the whole house,

as though the space itself had been seeking something extra – and, upon Clarissa’s

arrival, ‘[her] bed and her niche in the house were waiting for her as if she had always

lived there.’551

The household which has no child becomes almost haunted by this

absence, and by the ghosts of potential children; an image made literal in Rudyard

Kipling’s story ‘They’, which Humbert Wolfe compared to The Love-Child.552

Both

narratives find a supernatural answer to childlessness, and are propelled by the same

longing, as shown in Kipling’s 1904 story:

“They came because I loved them – because I needed them. I – I must have

made them come.”553

In Kipling’s story the children are, in fact, ghosts visible only to bereaved parents –

and also audible to one blind, childless woman who has longed to be a mother, and

whose desire is forceful enough to bring them. Had the excerpt above ended without

the final word, the attribution of causality could equally describe The Love-Child.

The domestic ‘rightness’ of Clarissa, fitting precisely into a gap which had prepared

itself for her, is also echoed in her affinity with Agatha and the gap in (or loss from)

Agatha’s character. Their life-giving relationship is synergetic. Agatha’s personality

ironically has the capacity to create Clarissa, but Clarissa, even while she was only an

imaginary friend, was ‘the only being who had every awoken her personality, and

550

Ibid. pp.51f 551

Ibid. p.52 552

Wolfe, 'The Growth of Fantasy in the Novel' p.68. 553

Rudyard Kipling, 'They' Traffics and Discoveries (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904) 339-

375, p.374

180

made it responsive’.554

Paradoxically, Agatha gives life to that which is needed to

give life back to her. The dormant absence at the centre of the home and the centre of

Agatha is filled by the arrival of Clarissa, completing (at least temporarily) the

construction of the ideal middlebrow home and animating her creator as a fantastic

equivalent to (or replacement of) the way that a 1930s book about spinsterhood said

that motherhood ‘recreates the mother’.555

Creation, in these narratives as with metamorphosis narratives, never exerts

repercussions in a single direction. The imaginative act always transforms the creator

as well. Agatha ceases to live ‘entirely without volition’ as the ‘passive tool’ of her

imposed routine.556

When Clarissa is brought to life by Agatha’s desires, Agatha is

herself brought to life by the fulfilment of these desires. More abstractly, in The

Venetian Glass Nephew, once Virginio is moulded from glass, Peter Innocent

immediately assumes some of the qualities of that unanimated glass which Virginio

has left behind:

The boy smiled, bowed, and sipped with the most lifelike gestures of politeness;

but Peter Innocent stood silent in a tranquillity like stone, bewitched and awed

by his felicity, and gazing at his nephew with infinite love and wonder in his

eyes.557

In this case, the effects of creation are not enlivening to the creator but the reverse.

Three verbs in quick succession, ‘smiled, bowed, and sipped’, emphasise Virginio’s

activity and mobility, while Peter Innocent’s immobility (‘like stone’, but equally like

glass) is juxtaposed. Although ostensibly a happy scene, it is a harbinger of the

struggle the ‘uncle’ and ‘nephew’ will face, which is often portrayed in the novel

554

Olivier, The Love-Child p.15 555

Cowdroy, Wasted Womanhood p.91 556

Olivier, The Love-Child p.42 557

Wylie, The Venetian Glass Nephew p.58

181

through the language of malleability and stasis. Peter Innocent later wonders, for

instance, whether he ‘might have preferred […] a creature malleable and engaging to

the affections’,558

and towards the end of the novel, when Virginio’s lover Rosalba

meets Peter Innocent, she recognises a likeness between uncle and nephew – but it is

Peter Innocent’s hand, rather than the glass one, that offers ‘unresponsive and chilly

finger-tips.’559

Even when creation seems to follow a detached method closer to the

model of Frankenstein, as it does in The Venetian Glass Nephew, the act still also

recreates the self, and establishes a complex and symbiotic psychological relationship

between creator and created.

These blurrings of the line between ‘self’ and ‘other’ necessarily complicate the

division between ‘themes of the self’ and ‘themes of the other’ that Todorov posits of

fantastic novels.560

He defines I/self fantasies as passive and not-I/other fantasies as

active, because in the latter the protagonist ‘enters into a dynamic relation with other

men’,561

but this distinction is not practicable for creation narratives in this mould,

which do not neatly separate into self and other. Todorov recognises the idea that

‘there is no longer any frontier between the object, with its shapes and colours, and

the observer’,562

echoing Rimbaud’s famous pronouncement ‘Je est un autre’, but

suggests this is a trope solely for ‘themes of the self’, not recognising that this is

always also a component of ‘themes of the other’: creators observing the fantastic are

far from immune to the deconstruction of object and subject.

558

Ibid. p.21 559

Ibid. p.132 560

Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre pp.107-139, esp. p.120; pp.138f 561

Ibid. p.139 562

Ibid. p.117

182

The creative power of desire and the difficulty of identity

Todorov’s stipulation that ‘themes of the other’ must relate to sexual desire563

is

certainly at odds with a middlebrow sensibility, and there seems no reason why the

impulse may not be – as the existence of Clarissa and Virginio suggests – the equally

fundamental desire for parenthood. As Mary Scharlieb writes in The Bachelor

Woman and Her Problems (1929):

It is quite a mistake to think that the majority of single women are ardently

desirous of the completion of their nature by marriage. There is a want in their

natures, but it is not this: very often the unfulfilled desire is for motherhood.

There is an incessant aching longing for the fulfilment of that primary feminine

instinct[.]564

The sexual longing which informs novels like Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is

replaced, for the middlebrow author, with a desire for motherhood. Winifred Holtby

argues against the association of spinsters with frustration – ‘a comparatively modern

notion’565

– but, when describing Agatha as ‘agonisingly frustrated’, 566

David Cecil

identifies simply another term for desire; again, for parenthood, not sex. The

‘completion of their nature’ which Scharlieb describes can only be performed through

unnatural means in these novels, and the ‘unfulfilled desire’ for motherhood is the

catalyst which permits creation and thus fulfilment.

For, to state explicitly what will have become clear, another way in which these 1920s

creation narratives differ from Frankenstein is that the dialectics of knowledge are

replaced by those of desire: rather than Frankenstein’s ‘almost supernatural

563

Ibid. p.138 564

Scharlieb, The Bachelor Woman and Her Problems p.54 565

Winifred Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilisation (London: John Lane, 1934) p.127 566

David Cecil, Introduction to Olivier, The Love Child p.6

183

enthusiasm’ for physiology,567

Agatha and Peter Innocent are driven primarily

(consciously or unconsciously) by the desire for a child: their purpose is not to know

more but to love more. Walter Scott praises Frankenstein because ‘the miracle is not

wrought for mere wonder’,568

but Shelley responds to a general enquiry about the

nature of life and creation, rather than the localised desire for offspring.

The premise for The Love-Child is that this absence does not only leave room for the

fantastic, but itself propels the fantastic. Loneliness (considered by one commentator

to be ‘the source of [an unmarried woman’s] unhappiness and restlessness’569

whether

she recognises it or not) acts like nature in abhorring a vacuum, and fills it – and

loneliness is certainly one of Agatha’s predominant characteristics when The Love-

Child opens:

[She felt] a loneliness that could not be broken, because it meant that she simply

hadn’t got the power of getting into touch with her fellow-creatures. Perhaps

Agatha felt nothing. Certainly she could never tell what she felt, nor ask and

receive sympathy570

Rather than simply being not ‘in touch’ with those around her, Olivier isolates Agatha

still further, distancing her in turn from the narrator and herself. The word ‘perhaps’

indicates that the narrator has stepped away from omniscience, severing this source of

solidarity, while the dual definitions of ‘tell’ (to communicate, and to comprehend)

offer the reading that Agatha is not even in touch with herself: she cannot tell what

she felt; she cannot comprehend her own feelings.

567

Shelley, Frankenstein p.49 568

Scott, 'On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and Particularly on the Works of Ernest

Theodore William Hoffman' p.72 569

Hutton, The Single Woman and Her Emotional Problems p.7 570

Olivier, The Love-Child p.9

184

Desire becomes a powerful stimulant, almost a Deus ex machina – as it often does in

fairytale. Pinocchio sets a precedent for creation narratives which centralise would-be

parenthood as a motivation, and in its fusion of craftsmanship and paternal love is a

model which is closely followed in The Venetian Glass Nephew. Although both these

instances involve the transformation of inanimate materials into living creatures (as

with Wylie’s novel), it is desire, rather than an alchemic sophistication, which propels

the stories. Since desire has this power in fantastic narratives, childless spinsters are

ideal wielders of this power – characters who reclaim and transform the archetypical

images of the single, female magician as inevitably a witch.

Agatha’s role as spinster is self-evident. While Peter Innocent is of course male, his

lament about lacking progeny relates equally to this zeitgeist, and the same emotions

and questions catalyse the narrative – indeed, since his is a conscious decision, his

motivations are clearer to read. It is described as ‘a small regret, an obscure

discomfort […] the recurrent thorn in the clean flesh of Peter Innocent; this was his

cross: he had no nephew.’571

Reference both to Christ’s cross and St. Paul’s thorn in

the flesh are indicative of the magnitude of Peter Innocent’s plaint, even when

presented in the understatement of the (supposed) biographer. Although bachelors did

not attract the same interwar scrutiny as spinsters, the fundamental desire for children

and the continuation of a genealogy is clearly not solely a female longing. It is

propriety, perhaps, which grants Peter Innocent a nephew rather than a son, and the

narrator’s biographical style retreats from omniscience when stating: ‘It is

conceivable that he may have permitted himself a passing dream of parenthood –

571

Wylie, The Venetian Glass Nephew pp.19f

185

conceivable, but unlikely’.572

Intentional play on the word ‘conceivable’ in the

context of childbirth is, itself, conceivable, but it is the status of the spinster in the

interwar period which was more prominent, and whose identity was most debated –

but in the creation narrative, identity is a fraught and complex topic.

Having recognised that Clarissa and Virginia (and, indeed, Miss Hargreaves) are not

independent, static creators, the question of identity becomes paramount (echoing the

forfeiture of identity experienced by spinsters when, as Cicely Hamilton notes in

Marriage as a Trade, they could not be defined in relation to a man: ‘the spinster [is

seen as] some man’s wife that should have been – a damaged article, unfit for use,

unsuitable. Therefore a negligible quantity.’)573

It is unclear what level of

personhood these characters can possess, being subsumed within their creators’

identities, but also existing separately and disturbing any binary division between

object and subject. Anxieties about selfhood caused by the unstable middlebrow

home could, through the fantastic, be made concrete and dramatised as tangible

figures.

The ‘humanness’ of the created beings is constantly in question. When Clarissa

eventually disappears in equally as sudden a manner as the way in which she arrived,

Agatha looks down at ‘an empty space, which a second before had held that clearly

defined little figure’.574

A play on the words ‘clearly defined’ draws attention to how

unclearly she has been defined (with her clothes, particularly her fairylike ‘white

dress’ usually taking the place of lengthier physical or ontological description) and

poses the question: who defines her? She undergoes a constant series of interpretive

572

Ibid. p.21 573

Cicely Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade (London: Chapman & Hall, 1909) p.6 574

Olivier, The Love-Child p.164

186

examinations, however inconclusive, by other characters and by the reader. The man

who seeks to woo her, David, attempts a form of genus-classification, using the same

technique seen in the arsenal of many critics of the middlebrow and defining by

negation:

What was she? Not a child, for she was seventeen, and taller than Kitty: not a

girl, for she floated like a feather, and flew into trees like a bird; not a spirit –

she was human to the touch.575

As with glassy Virginio, touch is an important factor in building an identity – yet a

deficient one. Clarissa cannot be deduced empirically, even though she has a physical

body, because this body does not accord with the laws of nature. She continually

resists any form of definition.

While Virginio and Clarissa do not seem to question their own ontological standing,

Miss Hargreaves does so through the poetry she writes:

I came, I go, I breathe, I move, I sleep,

I talk, I eat, I drink, I laugh, I weep,

I sing, I dance, I think, I dream, I see

I fear, I love, I hate, I plot, I be.

And yet –

And yet –

I sometimes feel that I am but a thought,

A piece of thistledown, a thing of naught,

Rocked in the cradle of a craftsman’s story,

And destined not for high angelic glory.

And yet –

And yet –

I came, I go, I move, I breathe, I sleep,

I talk, I eat, I drink, I laugh, I weep.576

575

Ibid. p.155 576

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.281

187

Her catalogue of verbs acts as an extension of Descartes’ ‘Cogito ergo sum’, in a

prolonged attempt to prove and rationalise her existence by listing her activities and

movements. Where Frankenstein’s Monster, when he begins to realise his contingent

status, questions ‘Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my

destination?’,577

Miss Hargreaves instead speaks in simple statements. Again, the

fantastic causes a disjunction between apparent empirical evidence and ontological or

philosophical truth. Miss Hargreaves seeks to ascertain her identity through the

actions she performs.

She does not list ‘I write’ amongst her attributes, but this is one of several poems she

composes throughout Miss Hargreaves. The creativity of created beings has been

used, more recently, within Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about cloning people to provide

spare organs for harvesting, Never Let Me Go (2005). Again, the proof of identity is

sought through the evidence of actions and activities: ‘“We took away your art

because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to

prove you had souls at all.”’578

The question of souls is sidelined as an

‘unwarrantable supposition’579

in Lady Into Fox, but it is a crucial component of

identity for Miss Hargreaves (and the characters in Never Let Me Go), and both of

these novels introduce the idea of language and literary composition as evidence of

thought and imaginative identity beyond the control of the creator.

The identity-conferring value of language recurs in these creation narratives – or

rather, the absence of language is an indication that identity is incomplete or

unquantifiable. Virginio doesn’t talk at all during his first scene, while his status is

577

Shelley, Frankenstein p.124 578

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (London: Faber & Faber, 2005) p.255 579

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.23

188

still uncertain to both reader and ‘uncle’, while Olivier keeps Clarissa’s dialogue to a

minimum throughout, noting in her diary: ‘I have made C. almost word-less – so as to

keep her magic’.580

It is this consideration which makes her turn down an offer, sent

via Cecil Beaton, to dramatise The Love-Child, as that would, naturally, involve

significant dialogue for Clarissa. Language, to Olivier, is inevitably a form of

elucidation, and so Clarissa’s relative silence keeps her on a fantastic plane.581

Correspondingly, in Miss Hargreaves language is seen as being part of the creator’s

apparatus, having its own transformative power:

“Well, certainly, the more I talked about Miss –”

“Don’t keep mentioning her name,” [Mr. Huntley] advised. “It’s dangerous.

She might easily become immortal. Then where would you be?”

“All I was going to say was, the more I talked about her, the more real she

seemed to become.”582

The speech act as a creative act – that which J.L. Austin terms a ‘performative

utterance’583

– has antecedents as distant as Genesis, where God speaks creation into

being. Language as creation relates to the act of writing, as well as speech. Although

all fiction exists only through language, this is especially true for the fantastic, which

accesses that which does not exist as a referent. As Todorov notes:

580

Olivier, 'Diary (December 1925 - December 1927)' (09/06/27) 581

Olivier is not alone in this decision. In Bea Howe’s A Fairy Leapt Upon My Knee (1927), for

instance, the eponymous fairy has no dialogue at all, and thus her presence interrogates the reality of

the central characters without she being expected or able to offer explanation or enter into dialectics. 582

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.50. It is unclear whether Mr. Huntley, Norman’s father, follows his own

advice or his natural absent-mindedness when addressing Miss Hargreaves, since he seldom gets her

name right. 583

‘The issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action.’ J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With

Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) p.6

189

The supernatural is born of language, it is both its consequence and its proof:

not only do the devil and vampires exist only in words, but language alone

enables us to conceive what is always absent: the supernatural.584

If mimetic fiction intends to reflect and describe lived reality, fantastic fiction

provides, in words, that which cannot be achieved outside of language. Each fantastic

description is in some senses a ‘performative utterance’, since it calls into being (at

least conceptually) that which does not exist in reality.

One of the reasons that fantastic beings in creation narratives have problematic

conceptions of identity is because, like a person undergoing metamorphosis, they are

divorced from their genealogy. In being created, they have not simply had this

genealogy stolen, but rather have no ancestors from whom to be removed. Miss

Hargreaves’ list of verbs in her poem are all in the present tense – except for ‘I came’;

the only linguistic frame of reference she has for her past is that she arrived, because

she (like Clarissa and Virginio) has no past. Conversely, Agatha and Peter Innocent

experience uneasy senses of identity because they have no future – or, rather, their

lineage has no future. Northrop Frye suggests that ‘fantasy is the normal technique

for fiction writers who do not believe in the permanence or continuity of the society

they belong to.’585

His generalisation can be made specific in relation to Agatha and

Peter Innocent, taken from the level of society to the microcosm of their lives: their

own bloodlines have been discontinued, and they seek refuge in the fantastic to battle

this impermanence.

584

Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre p.82 585

Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA;

London: Harvard University Press, 1976) p.138, quoted in Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic: From

Gothic to Postmodernism p.211

190

This concern does not drive the narrative of Miss Hargreaves (perhaps because that

novel was published in 1940, some years after the loudest outcry about widespread

childlessness), but The Love-Child and The Venetian Glass Nephew are informed by

the dislocation felt by those without descendants, and without the identity conferred

by familiar connections (conferred, instead, by the role of creator.) Leonora Eyles

writes in Unmarried But Happy that the single woman without children

has a problem unknown to the mother: she has loneliness and a sense of

frustration; and, not having known motherhood and in many cases having

steered clear of a physical love affair, she has the very human, regretful idea

that the unknown must have some magic about it.586

The ‘unknown’ in these novels does not apply simply to sexual relationships and

motherhood, but the identities conferred (or believed to be conferred) with these. The

idea that these statuses have ‘some magic’ – an idea which, in plebeian contrast, Eyles

describes as very human’ – is literalised in these fantastic narratives.

Adoption, agency, and non-fantastic creation

Any narrative which provides the childless with a child has an extant literal parallel

with adoption. Equivalent psychological processes exist for Agatha and Rosamund

Essex, a writer who retrospectively described her own experiences as an unmarried

adoptive mother between the world wars, done in order to avoid becoming ‘an

acidulated old spinster’.587

For both Essex and Agatha, the feeling of natural

parenthood eventually takes over the unorthodox way in which they become mothers

or mother figures. Essex writes that ‘[i]t was, from the beginning, almost an effort to

586

Eyles, Unmarried But Happy p.34 587

Rosamund Essex, Woman in a Man's World (London: Sheldon Press, 1977) p.15

191

remember that he was not my son by nature.’588

Similarly (although obviously

involving a greater leap of imagination), Clarissa ‘seemed in every way perfectly

normal, and Agatha herself often forgot that she wasn’t’.589

If memory of the past is

the only way Agatha can separate the real from the fantastic (since it is this memory

which is the sole evidence for Clarissa’s genesis) then, as their relationship becomes

naturalised and normalised in Agatha’s mind, so the fantastic narrative becomes

untethered from Agatha’s imagination.

Needing to disguise the fantastic, Agatha does indeed go through the process of

adopting Clarissa and it is, in fact, this process which leads to Agatha’s outburst that

Clarissa is her ‘love child’. In trying to formalise her relationship with Clarissa,

Agatha must compromise her identity – formed of ‘[h]er position, her name, her

character’590

– even though her main observers within the house, her servants, know

that she cannot have had a child. (In The Venetian Glass Nephew, since framed

through the mores of the eighteenth century rather than the twentieth, Peter Innocent

does not appear to have to attempt any of the same processes. His act of creation

comes without paperwork.) Adoption was still considered controversial by the

period’s many writers of guides for spinsters (which covered all bases of constructive,

commiserative, congratulatory, and condemnatory tones). Scharlieb is a rare voice

amongst these guides in stating that adoption is ‘very often the thing that is needed to

secure happiness and perfection of character’.591

The advice given elsewhere

concerning adoption is chiefly: ‘don’t’. Laura Hutton, for example, suggests that a

‘child adopted because the adopting mother’s affections are starved is [likely] to

588

Ibid. p.48 589

Olivier, The Love-Child p.53 590

Ibid. p.68 591

Scharlieb, The Bachelor Woman and Her Problems p.54

192

suffer serious psychic damage’.592

In Agatha’s case, Clarissa not only meets her

starved affections, but is born of them.

Yet, whether or not a spinster considered adopting, they were often believed to inflict

this sort of psychic damage on the nation as a whole, as though their loneliness were a

taint which could prove contagious, leaving the unmarried woman somehow both tied

to the home and an enemy of the home. For instance, Betsy Israel quotes an unnamed

MP’s speech from 1922:

A woman alone is an atrocity! An act against nature. Unmarried women pose a

grave danger… our great civilization could decline… the larger health of the

nation is at stake.593

Elsewhere, even when sympathetic to the plight of unmarried, childless women, many

publications framed their discussions primarily in terms of the impact upon the wider

public, as though the spinster’s emotions alone were not worthy of consideration.594

Women without children were even portrayed as unpatriotic: in 1920 the author of

Sterile Marriages asserted that ‘it behoves all who can in any way assist in the

replenishing of the diminished population of these islands to do so to the best of their

ability.’595

Although adoption on the part of the unmarried woman would not increase

the population, it was one potentially constructive response to the aftermath of the war

592

Hutton, The Single Woman and Her Emotional Problems p.138. (Emphasis is Hutton’s.) Leonora

Eyles writes similarly: ‘The child needs the natural interplay of emotions and temperaments in a

normal home with mother and father, and may easily become the victim of the new mother’s emotions

and possessiveness where there is no man to tone down these emotions. […] If an older woman,

certain of spinsterhood, takes on a baby, she may be too set in her ideals and habits to take happily to

the upheaval a child would bring to her life.’ [Eyles, Unmarried But Happy p.33] 593

Cited in Betsy Israel, Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century

(London: Aurum Press, 2003) p.14. (Israel’s ellipses.) Israel does not give the MP’s name. 594

To quote two sources, from the 1920s and 1940s respectively: ‘The whole subject is one of great

importance to the welfare of the nation, not only to the unmarried women themselves, but also to their

married sisters, their brethren, and the children of the nation.’ ; ‘[A] nation which has amongst its

citizens numbers of unhappy people is not a happy nation. So their problem becomes as much a matter

of grave social concern as a personal and family one.’ [Scharlieb, The Bachelor Woman and Her

Problems p.9 ; Eyles, Unmarried But Happy p.11] 595

Joseph Dulberg, Sterile Marriages (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1920) p.10

193

and the orphans war created – but was still considered psychologically unhealthy by

some.

A (somewhat fanciful) alternative to adoption, and solution to the problem of

childlessness, is presented in G.E. Trevelyan’s novel Appius and Virginia (1933).

The novel, like Collier’s His Monkey Wife, plays uncertainly around the parameters of

science fiction, the fantastic, and the non-fantastic. It could equally, indeed, be

entitled Her Monkey Son, for (although more weight is given to Appius’ slow

academic progress than Emily’s miraculous education in His Monkey Wife) it is this

relationship which is privileged in the novel. Virginia tries – and partly succeeds – to

train an ape as a human being. The allusion to John Webster’s play gives the novel a

literary precedent, but Trevelyan’s inspiration is evidently Darwinian. Where

Frankenstein experimented with the unreachable aspiration of scientifically creating

humans, Appius and Virginia responds to an escalating belief in the latent humanity of

apes, and refigures animal metamorphosis as a supposedly plausible scientific

narrative.596

Appius and Virginia becomes a creation narrative, however, as Virginia’s motivations

and assumed role develop:

She knew obscurely, inarticulately, that if this experiment failed her existence

would no longer be justified in her own sight. The newly awakened need of her

being to create would be frustrated utterly. She would sink back into the

nothingness out of which this enthusiasm had raised her.597

596

Perhaps these familiar discussions influence the few pages of The Love-Child where Clarissa adopts

a monkey: an evolution narrative to contrast with Clarissa’s genesis. 597

G.E. Trevelyan, Appius and Virginia (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1933) pp.23f

194

Virginia ultimately views herself as a creator, rather than an observer or teacher. In

describing the ‘need of her being to create’, Trevelyan introduces an almost sensually

somatic image, enhanced by labelling it ‘frustrated’; a term frequently, as Holtby

lamented, applied to spinsters. The motivation follows the same shift evident between

Frankenstein and The Love-Child; that is, from scientific to maternal desire. Her

experiment is eventually impelled by love rather than dispassionate research.

Appius’ development, even in attaining a relatively basic level of linguistic ability,

arguably pushes the narrative into the fantastic – but it is Virginia’s delusions of

maternity which transform the novel into a creation narrative. She begins to use the

semantics of a parental relationship, ‘the intimacy of mother and son’,598

revealing the

extent to which research has been supplanted by a desire for motherhood:

I was so lonely. I wanted you to grow up as my child. I wanted you to be

human. I wanted you to be something even more than a child, something I’d

made with my own brain out of nothing, and shaped as I wanted it, and watched

grow.599

This is curiously at odds with the relationship between Appius and Virginia in

Webster’s play, where Appius is sexually aggressive and Virginia is a chaste virgin

(as her name implies). The relationship of sexual partners (however unrequited)

becomes parental and filial – although in Webster’s play, as in Trevelyan’s novel,

Virginia is eventually killed. Virginia’s desire to create ex nihilo would ostensibly

have been met more fully by the creation narrative of The Love-Child, where Agatha

does precisely make Clarissa ‘with my own brain out of nothing’. These desires are

not met in the novel; since Appius’ mind is transformed, rather than created from

598

Ibid. p.174 599

Ibid. p.224

195

Virginia’s mind, her experiment is an act of metamorphosis – but her aspirations are

certainly those of the creator. Virginia’s supposed experiment is a failed stretch

towards the fantastic, since it is not a scientific impulse to perform the logically

impossible, nor to be so manipulative in the attempt.

Rather than primarily focalising through the simian character (as His Monkey Wife

does), only a few chapters are shown through Appius’ eyes – and his voice, which is a

fragmented depiction of the language learner, and evinces a lack of sophisticated

comprehension of his environment. Where Emily in His Monkey Wife constructed an

artistic narrative from junk, Appius cannot even create a coherent translation of the

objects surrounding him (for instance, the sky through the window becomes

‘Something there; the pale blue stuff. Hard and cold.’)600

Instead, the reader is shown Virginia’s anxieties and desires. Like Virginio, she has a

name which connotes purity – but also, in a common twentieth-century portrayal of

the virgin woman, a spate of unavoidable complexes. Winifred Holtby notes

ironically that a woman’s chastity leads to ‘doubts cast not only upon her

attractiveness or her common sense, but upon her decency, her normality, even her

sanity.’601

Texts written about spinsters often use a Freudian language to suggest the

inescapable, psychologically horrifying results of thwarted desire, discussing

‘repressed or dwarfed sex instinct’; ‘unconscious jealousy’, and ‘fixations and […]

arrest in emotional growth’, to cite three examples from many.602

The fate Virginia

600

Ibid. p.18 601

Winifred Holtby, 'Notes on the Way' Time and Tide, 04/05/35 (1935) 647-648, p.647 602

Cowdroy, Wasted Womanhood p.82; Ludovici, Lysistrata: or Woman's Future and Future Woman

p.47; Hutton, The Single Woman and Her Emotional Problems pp.49f

196

wishes to avoid is one of the more pessimistic portraits of spinsterhood in interwar

fiction:

She would go back to Earl’s Court and her bed-sitting-room – gas fire and

griller, separate meters; to her consumption of novels from the lending library;

her bus rides to the confectioner’s; her nightly sipping of conversation and

coffee in the lounge: to middle-age in a ladies’ residential club. Each year a

little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the bus –

“Come along there, please, come along,” and the struggle with umbrella and

parcels through the ranks of inside passengers, and the half compassionate, half

contemptuous hand of the conductor, grimy and none too gentle as she clambers

down the swaying steps on to the sliding pavement. – Each year a little less

bright in the after-dinner conversation; a little less able to remember the novels

she has read; a little less able to find a listener; a little less able to live, yet no

more ready for death.603

It is a decidedly middlebrow delineation of the spinster’s life, particularly in her

concern about ‘after-dinner conversation’, and the prosaic, rather than philosophical,

elements which compose her vision of middle- and old-age. It is envisioned through

domestic objects – the gas fire, the umbrella, the synecdochical hand of the conductor

– which act as the stigmata of the aging spinster, and although it remains in the third-

person, this excerpt is clearly intended to reveal the anxieties which obsess Virginia.

The potential accomplishments of a female scientist are undermined by juxtaposition

with the social and mental status awarded to the unmarried middle-class woman,

regardless of her other qualities. Virginia’s experiment, like Peter Innocent’s, is

presented as a talismanic response to the danger of loneliness, rather than considered

primarily on its research merits. Although the novel itself does provide both of these

impetuses – a spinster’s loneliness and a scientific mind – it is the former which is

ultimately prioritised, and emphasised by reviewers. Leonora Eyles, later to be author

of Unmarried But Happy, describes Virginia in a review as ‘pathetic, ageing, starved

603

Trevelyan, Appius and Virginia p.24

197

of opportunities as a scientist, starved of human contacts by her own shyness’.604

This evaluation of Virginia is quoted (although without quotation marks, or any

attribution) in dust jacket blurb of the American edition, silently incorporated into the

physical book’s paratexts as part of the reading experience.605

Any form of adoption, however, could offer autonomy to the unmarried woman –

who might have chosen not to marry rather than been a victim of this fate, of course,

but could not then choose to bear a child. For although Cicely Hamilton wrote as

early as 1909 that ‘motherhood does not appertain exclusively to the married state.

There is such a thing as an illegitimate birth-rate’,606

for the vast majority of

middlebrow spinsters, prizing respectability as Agatha does, agency was forfeited in

this area. Singleness meant childlessness – unless adoption offered potential

autonomy. Fantastic literature goes further, reinstating choice and intentionality for

childless people beyond that available through adoption.

A 1960s survey of elderly spinsters, many of whom would have been relinquishing

the likelihood of marriage in the 1920s, revealed that two-thirds felt they had been

‘deprived’ or failed to ‘fulfil themselves as women’ by not having children.607

One

respondent said:

604

Eyles, 'Review of Appius and Virginia' p.496 605 The same blurb (but not Eyles’ review) makes overt reference to ‘an unusual and fascinating genre’

which might appeal to ‘those who read David Garnett’s “Lady Into Fox” and John Collier’s “His

Monkey Wife”’. While the popularity of spinster novels is subtly evoked, the fantastic element is

identified through direct comparison. [Inside dustjacket blurb of Trevelyan, Appius and Virginia (n.p.)] 606

Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade p.257 607

Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War

p.117

198

I’d have loved to have had a child. I think every woman should be allowed to

have a child – married or not married. […] I have a dream son who’s very

good to me.608

It is revealing that this imaginary son is active in the theoretical relationship, rather

than being passively owned; the situation imagined by these unmarried women is not

one in which they have ultimate agency, but instead an identity contingent upon the

actions of the hypothetical child. It is precisely as a form of ‘dream daughter’

(connoting the imaginary and the ideal) that Clarissa’s existence begins, before

becoming active and independent herself.

“I hate her and I love her and – I’m half afraid of her”609

: power struggles

After the act of creation, however, these novels do not settle into a portrait of the ideal

home, with a fantastic panacea having stabilised any instability present at the outset of

the narrative. Although power is not a compelling force behind creation for these

middlebrow characters, it cannot be entirely extricated from the dynamics of desire,

and each novel eventually involves some variety of power struggle.

Even at first, Clarissa does not conform entirely to the idealised ‘dream’ daughter

Agatha has projected. When she appears she is ‘smaller even than Agatha had

imagined her’,610

exemplifying a disharmony from the outset between the controlled

projection of Agatha’s imagination, and Clarissa’s own independence. Yet ‘on her

feet were the little red shoes which Agatha knew she had always worn’:611

there is

compromise between the externalisation of Agatha’s need for a child and the

608

Ibid. p.118 609

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.109 610

Olivier, The Love-Child p.25 611

Ibid. p.25

199

autonomy gradually developing in Clarissa. (Similarly, Miss Hargreaves arrives with

various attendant objects, but as Norman loses control over her, ‘all the appendages,

such as whistle, pencil-on-chain, lorgnettes, with which I had first endowed her, had

long ago been discarded.’612

) These ‘appendages’, and the clothes the characters

wear, are like props in the theatre of self-realisation, and issues of control over these

seemingly innocuous objects act as a microcosm of a wider power struggle.

The dynamics of dependency are not solely one-way. While Agatha feels that ‘she

possessed all in possessing Clarissa’,613

elsewhere in the novel a chapter ends with the

words ‘Agatha was Clarissa’s only toy, and she was Agatha’s’.614

The blurring of the

line between creator and created, seen in the fusing selfhoods and elision of ‘self’ and

‘other’, also establishes a relationship of equal contingency in both directions. To be

each other’s ‘toy’ is a playful image, and a depiction of domestic harmony, but also

indicates a level of mastery or agency over the other.

In The Love-Child and Miss Hargreaves creation is not a single, static event, but an

ongoing issue of sustainment, depicted in the former novel through scientific analogy.

While the method of Clarissa’s creation is affirmably not a scientific experiment, their

resultant affinity is explored through the metaphor of interplanetary physics –

discovered by Agatha in the essay ‘Attractive Powers of Bodies’ from Sturm’s

Reflections. Agatha and Clarissa read this together, ‘entranced by it’;615

a term

suggestive of a fairy-tale, rather than a treatise. The following excerpt is quoted in

The Love-Child, with Olivier’s own ellipses:

612

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.275 613

Olivier, The Love-Child p.116 614

Ibid. p.48 615

Ibid. p.55

200

We often see two bodies approach each other without being impelled by any

external force. The cause which produces this effect is called Attraction, or that

principle whereby the minuter particles of matter tend towards each other… By

this is most satisfactorily explained the motions of the Heavenly Bodies…

These spheres, separated from each other by immense intervals, are united by

some secret bond.616

Agatha instantly aligns this image with the interconnection between herself and

Clarissa: ‘it was the attraction exercised by her own body which had drawn Clarissa to

her, and had given her life.’617

The heritage she identifies is not Frankenstein or

fairy-tale, but a peculiar meeting point of science and theology where the ultimate

creator is neither planet but rather God. Sturm’s Reflections contains dozens of essays

on a wide range of topics, and it is noteworthy that Olivier chose this particular one

for her metaphor. Even one of the essays preceding it, on spring as a sign both of life

and ‘the inconstancy of terrestrial things’, would have been equally fitting for her

topic, and (literally) rather closer to home, in concerning everyday, earthly matters.

‘Spring an Emblem of the Frailty of Human Life, and an Image of Death’ could even

prophecy the conclusion of The Love-Child, when speaking of lost youth:

We remember those happy days no more, but as the illusion of a dream, or as

some pleasing phantasy that plays upon the imagination, and suddenly leaves us

in all the consciousness of a weary existence. 618

This is almost exactly what does happen at the end of the narrative. Olivier’s choice

of ‘Attractive Powers of Bodies’ includes no such foreshadowing of Clarissa’s

eventual vanishment, nor the apposite words ‘phantasy’ and ‘illusion’. Perhaps

616

Ibid. p.55 (See also: C.C. Sturm, Sturm's Reflections on The Works of God and of His Providence

Throughout All Nature, 2 vols. (1; London: J.F. Dove, 1824) p.245) 617

Olivier, The Love-Child p.57 618

Sturm, Sturm's Reflections on The Works of God and of His Providence Throughout All Nature

p.242

201

Olivier intends them to be purposefully avoided in Agatha’s selection, to demonstrate

the character’s blindness to this fate.

The sense of magnitude which accompanies comparison with the planets (rather than,

more mundanely, flowers) does proffer greater contrast when compared with

Agatha’s own quotidian life. The grounding of the fantastic is made obvious by this

extravagant metaphor, showing how domesticated the otherworldly has become. This

contrast is explicitly demonstrated when Agatha and Clarissa enact an intragalactic

bond:

“You must go round and round in the middle of the lawn, and I shall go round

and round the outside. We can make a thread of your blue silk into the secret

bond. That would be perfectly invisible. But if I get too far away, it will break,

and I shall go out.”619

This, the first sign of Clarissa’s eventual quest for independence, is also a

domestication of an immense image. As well as drawing attention to the potential

fragility of their bond, the blue silk links back to the darning Agatha was engaged in

when Clarissa first appeared. This moment of domesticity is threaded through the

images which follow the intrusion of the fantastic.

Clarissa eventually disappears when she has, metaphorically, strayed too far from

Agatha’s orbit, and the creative act comes full circle in destruction: this cyclicality is

emphasised in the opening of the penultimate chapter, ‘Clarissa was gone’, echoing

the first words of the second chapter, ‘Clarissa came back’.620

Their interdependence

is an essential part of the blurring of their selfhoods, and ‘[Agatha] could not

619

Olivier, The Love-Child p.58 620

Ibid. p.164; p.19

202

altogether banish from her mind the uneasy feeling that Clarissa’s existence depended

on her own immediate presence – that if you happened to find the child alone, you

just wouldn’t find her at all.’621

Reflecting Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking

Glass and What Alice Found There (along with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a

form of ur-text for fantastic novels of the period) and Tweedledum’s assertion that,

should the Red King wake up, ‘“You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing

in his dream!”’622

– when Agatha faints, Clarissa does indeed briefly disappear.

Clarissa’s own account of her disappearance is that she has been ‘in the dark’,623

exemplifying the frequent comparison between darkness and the unexplained in

fantastic fiction (and in the English language more generally). She states that ‘“The

noise didn’t touch me […b]ut it must have hurt the ladder”’.624

The combined

synaesthetic (eliding ‘noise’ and ‘touch’) and anthropomorphic interpretations of the

event demonstrate Clarissa’s lack of access to normal analytical structures.

The eventual catalyst for the power struggle between these characters is, however, the

arrival of David, who is romantically interested in Clarissa. Instability enters a

narrative when characters themselves try to alter the genre of the text from within.

Any establishment of a creation narrative is simultaneously the establishment of a

Bildungsroman – by both the author and the creator character – which runs alongside

the subgenre structure of the fantastic. When the genre (or subgenre, or impulse) of

621

Ibid. p.53 622

Lewis Carroll and Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland &

Through the Looking Glass (New York: C.N. Potter, 1960) p.263. It should be noted that Alice is,

ultimately, not a fantastic novel – since Alice’s adventures turn out to have been dreamt. A.A. Milne

was one of many to protest against this ending, labelling it ‘wrong’ and ‘stupid’. While doing so, he

constructs an imaginary, fantastic conflict between Lewis Carroll and Charles Dodgson, mirroring

Edith Olivier’s own statement that, when writing late at night “one is quite another person to one’s

ordinary everyday self” [A.A. Milne, Year In, Year Out (London: Methuen, 1952) pp.13-15; Olivier,

Without Knowing Mr. Walkley: Personal Memories p.290] 623

Olivier, The Love-Child p.72 624

Ibid. p.72

203

romance enters the novel, as David attempts, there is a crisis of genre which unsettles

the extant, interdependent dynamic of creator and creation.

Similarly in The Venetian Glass Nephew, Rosalba and Virginio fall in love: ‘a brief

and iridescent cloud of unreality had enveloped them for a time in silence’.625

The

real eighteenth-century Venetian writer Carlo Gozzi, incorporated by Wylie as a

character, proclaims: ‘it will be an extremely charming little romance, a fairy-tale

come true’.626

Presenting romance in the fantastic framework of ‘unreality’ and

‘fairy-tale’ gives the novel some semantic consistency, but the structures of genre are

shifted. Peter Innocent’s intended Bildungsroman for Virginio – and, consequently,

metamorphosis of himself from childless priest to pseudo-parent – becomes instead a

romance narrative, which in turn becomes Rosalba’s metamorphosis narrative when

she opts to be transformed into glass.627

The creation narrative unravels; a starkly

simple sentence, almost at the end of the novel, exemplifies the cyclicality of the

creator’s experience: ‘Peter Innocent was very lonely.’628

Loneliness is intrinsic to

the creator’s role in these novels, since it is their inducement and their problem to

solve. It is also the counterpart of possessiveness, if the creator is a devisor of binary

fantastic affiliations which splinter and collapse. Having constructed an exclusive,

two-person relationship, loneliness is the inevitable result if, in expanding to include

another person, this relationship falls apart.

625

Wylie, The Venetian Glass Nephew p.80 626

Ibid. p.97 627

Although contemporary reviewers broadly gave equal weight to Virginio’s creation and Rosalba’s

metamorphosis, later commentators have focused primarily upon Rosalba’s transformation – mostly

because Rosalba is considered Wylie’s autobiographical portrait. [see Evelyn Helmick Hively, A

Private Madness: The Genius of Elinor Wylie (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2002) p.142;

Judith Farr, The Life and Art of Elinor Wylie (Baton Rouge; London: Louisiana State University Press,

1983) p.103; p.110] 628

Wylie, The Venetian Glass Nephew p.176. Similarly, Clarissa disappears in The Love-Child – the

first words of chapter fourteen, ‘Clarissa was gone’, echoing the first words of chapter two: ‘Clarissa

came back in the night.’ [Olivier, The Love-Child p.164; p.19]

204

While Peter Innocent willingly sacrifices his projected creation/fatherhood framework

when Virginio asks for his blessing, Agatha is reluctant to concede to Clarissa’s

romance narrative. A power struggle develops when David, tries to intercept the

binary bind between Agatha and her progeny.

Keeping David and Clarissa apart became a mania with her, and it was a terrible

strain. Every two or three days she pretended to have headaches, and thus kept

Clarissa to herself. These days were the breathing spaces which enabled her to

live.629

The vitality of imagination and unreality in the novel becomes tainted with its

equivalent in subterfuge and falsity. In this battle, Agatha also falsely claims to love

boating, castles, and tennis. Pretence, heretofore an enlivening activity, becomes

instead defensive and destructive – and destructive not only to Clarissa, but to

Agatha’s mental wellbeing, as ‘mania’ suggests.

The conflict between romance and the fantastic comes to its climax in a scene which

takes place in Agatha’s garden (and which culminates in Clarissa’s disappearance)

where David declares his love to Clarissa. Olivier recognised that her intentional

battle between genres in The Love-Child could inadvertently lapse into the romantic

clichés she was undermining: ‘I am trying to make it very trance-like & magic my

fear is that it will be pretty & cloying.’630

She also admitted that this scene was the

most difficult to write – perhaps understandably, as a spinster herself631

– and

629

Olivier, The Love-Child p.126 630

Olivier, 'Diary (December 1925 - December 1927)' (12/01/27) 631

A rather tactless friend noticed a similarity between Agatha and her creator, the author: ‘Clarissa, if

encouraged, & if your life were as empty as Miss Bodenham’s, would soon become as much to you!’

[Judith [surname not known], letter to Edith Olivier (20/05/27), Chippenham, Wiltshire and Swindon

History Century, Edith Olivier Papers 982/94]. The accuracy of this comparison is unclear; Olivier

was unmarried and childless, but her life was not ‘empty’. Cecil Beaton described hers as ‘a life of

205

corresponded with the popular American novelist Anne Sedgwick who suggested

reshaping David’s proclamation, considering the original ‘hum-drum & commonplace

& unworthy’.632

Sedgwick concentrates her assessment upon the realism of David’s

passion for Clarissa:

I feel that when you leave the centre of Clarissa you don’t give quite enough

consideration to the circumference, as it were: & in this chapter David’s

psychology makes me pause: gives me a sense of arrest & negation that really

spoils the end of the story. You have indicated a profound passion in him; a

deep, overwhelming love. Could he, when he gets her finally to himself, gets

her to come down to him in the moonlight, - adjourn his declaration? Wouldn’t

it burst forth at once? […David is] like a boy just beginning to be in love, rather

than a boy who has reached the climax of love & resolution?633

Sedgwick frames her discussion in relation to the circles of distance from Clarissa –

the ‘centre’ and the ‘circumference’ – similar to the planetary metaphor used in the

novel. Despite positing Clarissa as the centre of this psychological framework,

Sedgwick also recognises that Clarissa has been ‘strange, silent, ghost-like through

the chapter – drawing her being from David, as it were, until, with the final yielding,

the kiss, she snaps her link with living reality.’634

Here, romance is again figured as

unreality, yet antagonistic to the sustained existence of Clarissa as an un-real creation;

because she has been so fully absorbed into the everyday. Sedgwick views the

romantic influence within The Love-Child as its most un-real element: to her mind,

Clarissa’s genesis can be naturalised, but David’s romantic overtures must be the

opposite of ‘hum-drum & commonplace’.

Victorian conventionality’ – but one with ‘unlimited energy, vitality and zest for life’. [Cecil Beaton,

Ashcombe: The Story of a Fifteen-Year Lease (London: B.T. Batsford, 1949) p.1; p.40] 632

Olivier, 'Diary (December 1925 - December 1927)' (10/01/27) 633

Anne Sedgwick, 'Letter to Edith Olivier' (08/01/27), Chippenham, Wiltshire and Swindon History

Centre, Edith Olivier Papers 982/94 634

Ibid.

206

The bond between Agatha and Clarissa, although it is compared to the galaxies, is

spatially confined to the home environment, particularly the garden. Agatha is ‘ill at

ease’635

even while travelling to the hotel where she takes Clarissa when she first

appears; after three months there she is ‘homesick […and] longed to be with Clarissa

in her own home, and in the garden where her eyes had first rested on that beloved

little form.’636

The longing for home which is characteristic of many interwar

domestic novelists is propelled by an equal longing to situate Clarissa in felicitous

surroundings. It is apt, then, that in trying to break their interdependency (which he

sees as the result of ‘something uncanny in [Agatha’s] power’, labelling her a

‘vampire’, a common term for possessive mothers in the period),637

David introduces

Clarissa to motoring. Unlike Peter Innocent’s ‘rival’ Rosalba, who changes herself to

become more like Virginio, David seeks to undermine their bond by pulling Clarissa

away from her home and into being more like him.

Agatha’s spatial security relies upon inviolable rings of domestic space; David and his

car transport Clarissa away from this domain, and away from the reaches of Agatha’s

control. The experience effects metamorphoses in both Agatha and Clarissa:

When Agatha and Clarissa met at luncheon, it was easy to see that their drive

had affected them in very different ways. Agatha’s face was the colour of sand,

and her usually neat hair was dragged and untidy. She looked shattered –

exhausted – broken. Clarissa, on the other hand, had more colour than she had

ever had in her life.’638

635

Olivier, The Love-Child p.38 636

Ibid. p.49 637

Ibid. p.151; Nicola Beauman cites a correspondent in The Times (12th

May 1914) on the topic of

possessive mothers: ‘Every day a host of human vampires drain the life-blood of those who are their

nearest and should be their dearest.’ [Beauman, A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-39

p.75] 638

Olivier, The Love-Child p.97

207

Both are marked physically by motoring. While Agatha’s appearance is distorted and

disordered, Clarissa, who had been ‘very pale’639

on her arrival, is now flushed with

colour. The loss of her translucence brings her closer to reality and further from

Agatha’s remit as fantastic creator. David has ‘opened for her the gate to the

Kingdom of Reality, and she looked past him into a new world.’640

Even phrased in

this mythological manner, the introduction of the car represents a departure from the

fantastic, and the beginning of an escape from Agatha. Nicola Beauman cites

Virginia Woolf’s diary entries from 1927:

We talk of nothing but cars… This is a great opening up in our lives… the

motor is turning out the joy of our lives, an additional life, free & mobile &

airy[.]641

Beauman elides two separate entries, and omits this from the first: ‘[It will] expand

that curious thing, the map of the world in ones [sic] mind. It will I think demolish

loneliness’.642

Woolf’s term ‘an additional life’ corresponds with both psychological

lexes and the plot of the creative narrative – yet, though the car offers this further life

for Clarissa, for Agatha, rather than demolishing loneliness, automobiles threaten the

new refuge from loneliness which she has found.

Miss Hargreaves, madness, and the God complex

The battle for power becomes most overt in the novel which starts most flippantly.

Miss Hargreaves and Norman share a bond which permits only one of them to be in

control: ‘Power ebbed from me and rose in her. It would always be so; always. If I

relinquished my power over her, she would seize it and exert it over me. What I had

639

Ibid. p.25 640

Ibid. p.108 641

Beauman, A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-39 p.321. (Ellipses are Beauman’s.) 642

Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3 (1925-30) p.147

208

made was becoming too strong for me.’643

Their relationship is damagingly

synergetic. The idea of a created being psychically overpowering the creator has its

antecedent in Frankenstein, but Miss Hargreaves’ strength is psychical, rather than

physical. Like Agatha Bodenham, Norman uses resources from within himself in the

act of creation, even if this is only his imagination rather than fundamental desires.644

If Agatha is like a fantastic novelist crafting the narrative of her character, Norman is

akin to the novelist or artist who is subsumed by their creativity: ‘that was just why I

wanted to get rid of her; she was too powerful an influence over me.’645

Imaginative creation, in this novel, no longer relates closely to the desire for a child -

firstly because Norman has no wish at all for the being he inadvertently creates, and

secondly because she is an octogenarian. By the end of the interwar period, more

pressing concerns were dominating public attention, and the spectre of the two million

spinsters had ceased to preoccupy quite so many people; Cicely Hamilton wrote in the

year that Miss Hargreaves was published that ‘the once traditional contempt for the

spinster is [now] thoroughly a thing of the past.’646

As war began again, and it was

once more real children (rather than hypothetical children) who were collectively

mourned, the creation narrative changed tack, and questions of mortality and the

afterlife are eventually addressed in Miss Hargreaves, and the contest for agency does

not solely concern existence in this world. Miss Hargreaves’ anxiety concerns

whether or not, to quote her poem again, she is ‘destined […] for high angelic glory’;

in the play version of Miss Hargreaves (adapted by Baker in 1952) her determination

643

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.238 644

Baker does, however, resist a metaphysical reading of Miss Hargreaves. When Miss Hargreaves

disappears, Norman has a vision of her struggling down a dark tunnel. What could be an esoteric scene

is shown later to be simply a corridor within a church: Baker is flippant with the high-flown. 645

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.101 646

Cicely Hamilton, The Englishwoman (London: Longmans, 1940) p.27, quoted in Beauman, A Very

Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-39 p.88

209

is made more overt: ‘Well, hold your head high, Hargreaves! Stake out your claim

for immortality while there is yet time!’647

Throughout the play, although nothing of

great significance is changed (and much of that which is changed is done for practical

reasons; for instance, Miss Hargreaves arrives at the Huntleys’ house rather than the

railway station), some subtlety is lost in relation to Miss Hargreaves’ genesis. Or,

rather, Baker responds to the physicality and tangibility of the stage by investing the

props as creative resources. Rather than simply coming to his imagination, and

formed in it arbitrarily, Miss Hargreaves and her appendages are inspired by seeing

beforehand (in the house Miss Hargreaves will occupy): ‘the old harp – with the

moonlight slanting across the broken springs’.648

Domestic objects concretise the

imaginative process, in a manner appropriate for a play which (in turn) concretises the

narrative of a novel.

To return to the novel; Miss Hargreaves regains some power, but Norman plays the

role of God in the novel, from speaking her into existence in a way comparable to

creation accounts in Genesis, to eventually speaking her out of existence in the same

way: just as ‘Creative thought Creates’ is a motto at the start of Miss Hargreaves’

existence, ‘Destructive thought Destroys’ is the mantra to which Norman turns at the

end.649

His equivalent of longing for a child is longing to be, more abstractly, a

creator. Although other creation narratives incorporate baptism scenes (these appear

in The Love-Child, The Venetian Glass Nephew, and Appius and Virginia, as well as

Lady Into Fox; the act of baptism, like the initial creation, is a tangible act embodying

647

Frank Baker, 'Miss Hargreaves: A Play' London, British Library, Lord Chamberlain's Plays 1952/36

p.49 648

Ibid. p.9 649

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.223

210

intangible forces650

) theistic connotations are most strongly brought out in Miss

Hargreaves. Norman Huntley, as the narrator, makes a tentative comparison with

God himself:

Everything, it seemed to me, was just within my grasp. (Yes, I know it was all

a horrible blasphemy, but there it is.) For that moment I accepted Miss

Hargreaves without question or complaint. […] If she was still a little out of

control – well, don’t all created things get out of control before long? Well, I

mean, look at us… God thought we were a very good job. And look at us…651

Although he mentions blasphemy, it is confessions such as this which prevent

Norman from being blasphemous, simply by considering the role of God as the

ontological starting point in a chain of creators. Although Norman considers the

potential gamut of his power, he does not arrogate himself above the ultimate Creator.

Yet when Miss Hargreaves herself has a dawning realisation of her status as a created

being, she refers to ‘my maker’,652

choosing the one appellation for God which

emphasises God-as-creator, and which applies to Norman. Earlier in the novel, her

reference to ‘my Maker’653

uses a capitalised ‘M’, indicating that, by the end of the

novel, she has recognised the non-divine nature of her creator.

The self-awareness which proves the undoing of Frankenstein’s Monster (but which

never seems truly to affect Clarissa or Virginio) here has eternal consequences. The

sanctity of life is approached differently in The Venetian Glass Nephew: it is

‘murderous’ metamorphosis, rather than ‘the vivification of a few handfuls of

650

As a friend wrote to Olivier, ‘the ceremony of baptism portrays more forcibly than would pages of

description the perplexity involving Agatha as to the possession by Clarissa of an immortal soul.’

[Morrison, 'Letter to Edith Olivier' ] 651

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.176 652

Ibid. p.292 653

Ibid. p.180

211

harmless Murano sand and a pipkin of holy water’654

which is considered the possible

affront to God, because one creates from the inanimate, and the other distorts that

which God has already created.

One of the weapons in Miss Hargreaves’ arsenal, before she capitulates, is to question

her creator’s sanity:

“Norman’ – and her tone was almost pitying – “there can be no doubt. No

further doubt. Your brain is rapidly becoming affected.”655

The idea of the created being questioning the stability of their creator is a new variant

of the ‘deadly independence’ Callois considered a predicate for the creation narrative;

rather than going on a murderous rampage like Frankenstein’s Monster, Miss

Hargreaves instead turns upon the security of his mind.

Madness, as a discourse, is never distant from fantastic narratives. The permeable

line between reality and fantasy (and the inability to separate subject and object) is

both a trope of the fantastic and a trait of the psychotic. And, like the fantastic, the

language used to discuss madness often borrows from the semantics of the home,

boundaries, and rooms; in May Sinclair’s 1923 short story ‘The Flaw in the Crystal’,

for instance, insanity is described as initially ‘a question of borders and of thresholds

[…but] they had passed all that. He had gone clean over; he was in the dreadful

interior’.656

Rabkin describes madness as ‘an interior escape’, and, like the fantastic,

a response to the inadequacy of the real: ‘a flight directly away from some

654

Wylie, The Venetian Glass Nephew p.152 655

Baker, Miss Hargreaves p.239 656

May Sinclair, Uncanny Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1923 repr.2006) p.67

212

apprehended reality that the individual finds intolerable’.657

It thus finds affinity with

novels such as The Love-Child which start from a basis of wish-fulfilment, even if this

is later distorted. Madness and the supernatural can both be considered potential,

though invariably flawed, escapes from middlebrow discontent.

Although ‘madness’ means little in a Fantasy novel, where natural laws do not exist

and thus standards of normative sanity are also non-existent, in fantastic novels it can

remain as a parallel narrative; that is, a potential explanation for the strange events of

the novel which is coexistent with the fantastic hypothesis. As an interpretive

process, madness and the fantastic often do run parallel (particularly in novels like

Miss Hargreaves and The Love-Child which already presuppose a psychological

involvement from the characters) with neither explanation entirely accounting for the

narrative. It is another instance where popular opinion of unmarried women’s

characteristics makes a spinster the perfect character to host the fantastic. Spinsters of

the period are often portrayed not only as isolated and possibly damaging to the

nation’s mental health, but themselves destined for ‘eccentricities (to call them no

worse), and sometimes […] the madhouse.’658

In Flower Phantoms, Hubert tells his

sister that ‘“[a] woman isn’t sane until she’s married”’,659

while Winifred Holtby

recognises (but does not endorse) ‘the current superstition that madness or bitterness

lie in wait for virgins.’660

Her term ‘superstition’ effectively dismisses any sort of

scientific ratification, and equates this pseudo-Freudian warning with an old wives’

657

Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature p.194 658

Cowdroy, Wasted Womanhood p.86. Maud Churton Braby brazenly states that it is ‘a well-known

physiological fact that numbers of women become insane in middle life who would not have done so if

they had enjoyed the ordinary duties, pleasures and preoccupations of matrimony’. The contrast

between the vagueness of ‘insane’ and the pseudo-science of ‘well-known physiological fact’

demonstrates the confident inaccuracies attacking unmarried women in the period. [Braby, Modern

Marriage and How To Bear It p.50] 659

Fraser, Flower Phantoms p.85 660

Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilisation p.133

213

tale. Apter writes that ‘there is no method for distinguishing perceptions which

register common agreement from those which register an idiosyncratic and possibly

insane vision’,661

and this is shown in two scenes from The Love-Child which differ

chiefly in the way perspective is used. The novel ends with Agatha chasing a non-

existent Clarissa; a servant does not intervene, for ‘when she looked at Agatha’s

mindless face, she saw that it was quite happy.’662

David Cecil suggests that the

‘whole last quarter of the story is chilled by a stealthy waft of uncanny terror, the

terror that is inseparable from madness.’663

But this scene is almost identical to one

earlier in the novel, shortly after Clarissa’s first appearance:

She went into the house, hoping that neither of the servants had seen her racing

madly about the garden, pursuing someone whom she realized had not been

there at all. They would have thought her mad. And would they be right or

wrong?664

The only difference between these scenes is in narrative focalisation. While earlier

the reader views Clarissa through Agatha’s perspective, later it is through the

servants’, with their ongoing concerns about Agatha’s ‘very unnatural state’665

–

‘unnatural’ bridging the various categories of madness, childlessness, and the

fantastic. Anna Koenen writes that madness ‘is always a definition from the outside,

from an objectifying distance, never from the inside.’666

This point, though intended

to pertain to psychological definitions which Koenen considers hegemonic, is equally

applicable to narratives. The framework of madness is dependent upon focalisation,

and the contrast between Agatha’s viewpoint and the servants’ viewpoint (though all

661

Apter, Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality p.67 662

Olivier, The Love-Child p.174 663

Cecil, 'Introduction' p.7 664

Olivier, The Love-Child p.28 665

Ibid. p.37 666

Anna Koenen, Visions of Doom, Plots of Power: The Fantastic in Anglo-American Women's

Literature (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Vertag, 1999) p.12

214

are given in the third person) brings with it the suggestion of insanity. Agatha’s

servants have proved both astute and flawed observers in The Love-Child; they know

she cannot have given birth to Clarissa, but elsewhere Helen (the maid) misreads

Agatha’s conversation with Clarissa as a ‘paroxysm of sorrow’ upon her mother’s

death.667

Olivier does not intend the reader to come to a definite verdict concerning

Agatha’s sanity, but by introducing madness into the second of two replicated scenes,

Olivier disturbs any neat conclusions about Clarissa’s corporeality or eventual

absence.

Despite Glen Cavaliero’s suggestion that the popularity of fantastic novels can be

attributed to their ‘preoccupation with the potential power of imaginative creation’,668

Olivier, Wylie, and Baker cannot be considered the fictive equivalent of Hillis’

cheerful Live Alone And Like It and its ilk because these novels obviously do not

provide practicable solutions to childlessness. Even within the narratives themselves,

the fantastic does not act as an infallible answer to the desire for a child, leading, as

they do, to power conflicts, loss, and even the spectre of madness. Yet these novels

do offer what Rabkin calls ‘a message of psychological consolation [...] for its

audience, psychologically useful’669

by exploring the ways in which the middlebrow

fantastic can offer new perspectives and revitalise debate within a subgenre which

was growing tired: the ‘spinster novel’. Middlebrow novels which use the fantastic

often do so as a way of expanding not only possibility but permissibility. These

creation narratives, particularly Olivier’s, use – and update – an ancient trope to

address a contemporary anxiety, modernising this branch of the fantastic, and tying it

inextricably and empathetically to the lived reality of the middlebrow audience.

667

Olivier, The Love-Child p.75; p.17 668

Cavaliero, The Supernatural and English Fiction p.187 669

Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature p.73

215

Chapter Five

‘She can touch nothing without delicately transforming it’670

:

Re-creating Self in Lolly Willowes

Despite being a novel about witchcraft, which might thus be expected solely to favour

the atavistic and backward-looking, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926)

directly concerns what Punch described as the 1920s ‘burning question, what to do

with our supernumerary spinsters’,671

although not the topic of childlessness; Laura

Willowes (like her author672

) voices no desire for children. Instead, Lolly Willowes

addresses the question of spatial dependency and spatial autonomy for spinsters,

through the fantastic lens of witchcraft, which Laura chooses in preference to her

status as a dependent relative.

Laura’s transformation into a witch has aspects of both metamorphosis narrative and

creation narrative, acting as a meeting point of the two, in an act of self-(re)creation.

The distinction between metamorphosis and self-creation is not absolute; a review of

The Love-Child attempts to set up a dichotomy between metamorphosis and creation

by stating that ‘[i]n “Lady Into Fox” something is changed by the imagination; in

“The Love-Child” something is created.’673

Change and creation cannot be entirely

separated, though. Both facets are present in Lolly Willowes, but the novel is not (as it

is often read) ultimately triumphalist: neither creation nor metamorphosis is permitted

to reach fulfilment and images of quasi-metamorphosis (where transformation is

670

Oliver Warner, 'Sylvia Townsend Warner' The Bookman, October (1929) 8-9, p.8 671

Punch (14/4/26), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of

Reading 672

Warner wrote in her 1937 diary that ‘bearing children reduces women to extremes of potential

nobility or potential baseness in anything like a crisis. But robs them of the impulse to behave with

reason and decency.’ [Sylvia Townsend Warner and Claire Harman, The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend

Warner (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994) p.102] 673

Harry Salpeter, 'The First Reader' News, 26/08/27 (1927) [n.p.]

216

begun but not completed) are iterated throughout the novel. Throughout these stages,

Laura Willowes’ evolving identity is tied inextricably to questions about space and

the ownership of it, and the parallel evolution these matters take.

‘A sort of extra wheel’674

: Laura and the Willowes’ home

As the novel opens, Laura is moving into the house belonging to her older brother

Henry, upon the death of her father; like many contemporary spinsters, she has little

volition in the matter. Spatial independence was a growing concern for unmarried

women in the interwar period, seen throughout the social and cultural scale, from

Marjorie Hillis’ Live Alone and Like It to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

Although by 1947 Leonora Eyles suggests that a ‘single woman can, in most cases,

choose to live where she likes’, this was far from true in the 1920s: the Mass

Observation diarist Nella Last recalls, also in 1947, that ‘When I was a girl, for a

woman to live alone, even if she had money to do it, which was rare, it would have

been unthinkable.’675

The broader post-war concern about housing, dislocation, and

ownership of one’s own home was focused more closely in the period’s changing

expectations and aspirations for an unmarried woman’s control over her domestic

space. The home could, in turn, exert an effect on the inhabitant, acting in Lolly

Willowes both through the combined force of its occupants and, somehow, with its

own agency. As Warner writes in her diary: ‘Every house I passed was a story’;676

her metaphor bypasses the more common idea that each house has a story, thus

674

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.46 675

Eyles, Unmarried But Happy p.96; Nella Last, Patricia E. Malcolmson, and Robert W. Malcolmson,

Nella Last's Peace: The Post-War Diaries of Housewife, 49 (London: Profile, 2008) p.151. Virginia

Nicholson does note that, in 1930, ‘various utopian bodies, like the Women’s Pioneer Housing

Company, did look out for their needs and started a programme of converting old houses into groups of

apartments for independent singles’. [Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived

Without Men After the First World War p.143] 676

Warner and Harman, The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner p.17

217

granting the house an independent powerfulness. As Briganti and Mezei note, ‘both

novel and house are dwelling places and spaces whose deep structures demonstrate

anatomical, psychological and descriptive equivalences.’677

This trope is well-

documented, but in Lolly Willowes the power of houses means that the story they

represent and assert can overwhelm Laura’s personal narrative; this is the situation as

the novel opens, where Laura is passed from one male relative to another as though

she were an inherited item of furniture. Indeed, the conversation in the first pages of

the novel concerns Laura’s ability to ‘fit in’ to ‘the small spare-room’, if various

articles of furniture are moved or taken from Laura.678

The Willowes family ‘took it

for granted that she should be absorbed into the household’, depersonalising Laura,

who feels ‘rather as if she were a piece of family property forgotten in the will’.679

She is not expected to alter the essential domestic dynamics, but instead act as a

passive addition to an extant organism.

Yet already this opening to the novel problematises the popular idea that Laura is the

victim of possessive, oppressive men, and that Lolly Willowes documents ‘her escape

from imperfect patriarchy’, ‘the fantastical version of a feminist manifesto’ or is

‘crypto-lesbian’ (as Gan sagely points out in response to this theory put forward by

Jane Garrity, ‘sometimes a spinster is simply a spinster’.)680

Some have railed against

677

Briganti and Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E.H. Young p.18 678

Warner, Lolly Willowes pp.1f 679

Ibid. p.6. The idea of Laura as a domestic object was noted by some contemporary commentators,

such as Oliver Warner’s description of Laura as ‘a beloved pincushion to an exhausting number of

relations.’ [Warner, 'Sylvia Townsend Warner' p.8] 680

Nesbitt, 'Footsteps of Red Ink: Body and Landscape in Lolly Willowes' p.449; Frances Bingham,

'The Practice of the Presence of Valentine: Ackland in Warner's Work' in Gill Davies, David Malcolm,

and John Simons (eds.) Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner, English Novelist 1893-1978

(Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006) 29-44, p.41; Garrity, Step-daughters

of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary p.172; Wendy Gan, Women,

Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan,

2009) p.167

218

these interpretations,681

but Laura as the figure of the witch has frequently been

treated as shorthand for masculine oppression and female emancipation.682

(Indeed,

the supernatural nature of the novel has often been sidelined altogether, as being of

only metaphoric significance, but it ought not to be forgotten that Warner

determinedly chose the fantastic, telling a journalist: ‘Dozens of people have written

to me asking me whether I meant that she became a witch only symbolically […] I

meant quite literally that she became a witch.’)683

Yet the dynamics of the family and

the way they are introduced to the narrative unsettles this male/female dichotomy.

Henry’s name is not mentioned until after Laura’s sisters-in-law Caroline and Sibyl

have been introduced as antagonistic, and it is Caroline who is most vehemently keen

to subjugate Laura in the house, while Sybil is the figure who battles with Laura for

power, arguing that it ‘seemed proper that she should take Laura’s place as mistress of

the household […] and assume the responsibilities of housekeeping.’684

Laura’s

raison d’être is removed, and it is the women of the Willowes family who challenge

and remove her standing, compacting her status as superfluous spinster. Whereas

Laura’s sympathetic father had ‘greatly desired a daughter’685

and leaves her £500 a

year686

(precisely the amount Woolf later asserts as necessary for women, in A Room

681

For instance, Eleanor Perényi wrote that ‘[Lolly Willowes and The True Heart have been] published

for a feminist audience. I doubt if [Warner] would have minded this, but I must say that I do. To read

in a preface to Lolly Willowes that “with chilling immediacy this book speaks today, as it did in 1925,

for women” is to encounter the dreariest feminist rubbish.’ [Perényi, 'The Good Witch of the West'

p.28] The preface Perényi quotes is Anita Miller’s. [Anita Miller, Introduction to Lolly Willowes, or,

the Loving Huntsman (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1926 repr.1978).] 682

Diane Purkiss identifies the same simplification in many critical examinations of (real) medieval

witch trials; that is, that all the ‘witches’ were wholly innocent women, and the ‘hunters’ wholly evil.

‘It is a story about how perfect our lives would be – how perfect we women would be, patient, kind,

self-sufficient – if it were not for patriarchy and its violence. […] The witch offers opportunities for

both identification and elaborate fantasy’. [Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and

Twentieth-Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996) pp.8ff] 683

‘The Modern Witch’, Newcastle Daily Journal & North Star (26/6/26), Chatto & Windus Archive

CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of Reading 684

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.35 685

Ibid. p.12 686

It is also true, of course, that this money is mismanaged by her brother (reinforcing Marjorie Hillis’

advice that ‘[w]hen it comes to investing, in general, it’s a good idea for the average none-too-

219

of One’s Own), the female members of the Willowes family are unflinchingly

domineering and oppressive.

Although Laura’s often-cited speech to Satan at the end of the novel does suggest that

she has become a witch as a means of female emancipation,687

there is incongruity

between these impassioned words and Laura’s tone in the rest of the novel. Before

she moves to Great Mop, she announces that ‘Nothing is impracticable for a single,

middle-aged woman with an income of her own.’688

Although Warner doubtless

intends this statement to demonstrate something of Laura’s naivety, since many things

were of course still impracticable, it does suggest that Laura’s motivations are not

initially a protest at her place as a woman, but rather as a dependent person, derogated

by the Willowes family and their home collectively – as William Maxwell wrote to an

enquirer; ‘I am inclined to feel that much more than spinsterhood what occupied

[Warner’s] mind during the course of her life was people who were misused or

exploited.’689

Laura’s inferiority within the home is imposed by a family, not simply the male

members of that family. There is little functional distinction between the Willowes’

space and the Willowes family in the first stage of the novel, either from Laura’s

businesslike woman not to do it with relatives or even old friends’ and showing how Laura cannot

completely escape her family), but one brother ought not to be extrapolated out to an entire schema of

patriarchal oppression. [Hillis, Live Alone and Like It pp.116f] 687

Warner, Lolly Willowes pp.234-9, including ‘When I think of witches, I seem to see all over

England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and unregarded.’

(p.234) 688

Ibid. p.102. (By a transition to the fantastic, the novel does, indeed, make the impracticable

practicable.) Despite evidence to the contrary, this sentiment was expressed from the beginning of the

century – in 1901 Myrtle Reed wrote in her (admittedly satirical) The Spinster Book that ‘The chains of

love may be sweet bondage, but freedom is hardly less dear. The spinster, like the wind, may go where

she listeth, and there is no one to say her nay’. [Myrtle Reed, The Spinster Book (London: The

Knickerbocker Press, 1901) p.211] 689

William Maxwell, letter to Mr. Field (06/03/81), Sylvia Townsend Warner Archive (H(L)/37/7),

Dorset County Museum

220

perspective or theirs, and this is established linguistically. In a passage which also

exhibits the distinct codes of social behaviour required of an enclosed family – as

opposed to a meeting with outsiders – the Willowes’ dominance is demonstrated:

They fell into silence. At an ordinary dinner party Caroline would have felt this

silence to be a token that the dinner party was a failure. But this was a family

affair, there was no disgrace in having nothing to say. They were all

Willoweses and the silence was a seemly Willowes silence.690

Significantly, on this and other occasions, ‘Willowes’s’ (or ‘Willowes’’) is indicated

without use of the possessive apostrophe. This ‘silence’ (for instance) does not

merely belong to the Willowes family as a characteristic, but has somehow become

absorbed into their being and stamped with their identity. They patent their attributes,

refusing them autonomy (in a close mirroring of Laura’s relationship to the house).

The legacy of the family history, as well as the tenacious pride of the immediate

family, gives them an indomitable domestic control. The Willowes’ absorption of

others extends beyond their familial affinities to encompass their possessions: Sibyl,

Laura’s other sister-in-law, ‘professed herself enchanted by the Willowes walnut and

mahogany’.691

Again, this furniture is not ‘Willowes’ walnut’, but ‘Willowes

walnut’, enveloped into the Willowes’ colonising and repressive identity.

Laura is not simply repressed, however, by her brother’s house and her placement

within it. Rather, she has an unhealthily dependent relationship with the house:

They had seen her at home, where animation brought colour into her cheeks and

spirit into her bearing. Abroad, and in company, she was not animated.692

690

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.91 691

Ibid. p.35 692

Ibid. p.25

221

This house is a life-giving force, in the same way that in The Love-Child Clarissa

enlivens Agatha, putting ‘colour in her cheeks’ so that she ‘almost looked

animated’.693

The same image of subverted enlivening physically marking the woman

is attributed to Laura’s relationship with the home, but this bond is equally a

restrictive one. Laura’s selfhood is eroded; she also requires ‘animation’, and without

it she is left passive and inert outside the narrow parameters of the home. The term

‘animation’ itself suggests a creative hand elsewhere, removing the agency of the

person being given life. The dichotomy of public/private shapes her personality,

whether she wills it or not:

[S]he had become two persons, each different. One was Aunt Lolly, a middle-

aging lady, light-footed upon stairs, and indispensable for Christmas Eve and

birthday preparations. The other was Miss Willowes, “my sister-in-law Miss

Willowes,” whom Caroline would introduce, and abandon to a feeling of being

neither light-footed nor indispensable. But Laura was put away.694

The primary distinction is not between Laura’s inner and outer lives, her thoughts and

her actions, as one might expect. Neither of these ‘persons’ is, in fact, Laura. Rather,

they are the manifestations of an assumed (or foisted) personality, dependent upon

whether she is within the home, or elsewhere – and when elsewhere she is still

introduced to others in terms of her affiliation with the house and position in it. Even

the supposed virtue of feeling ‘light-footed upon stairs’, although a delicate

gentlewomanly version of a Homeric epithet, is also an image of domestic uneasiness.

She is depicted as constantly in a state of unsettlement, moving between floors rather

than remaining static or resolved. The familial division between public and private is

not stable or even possible for Laura, who is never ‘at home’ with the family. As

Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes, ‘family privacy, an aggregate privacy […] does not

693

Olivier, The Love-Child p.15 694

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.61

222

insure – indeed, it prevents – individual privacy.’695

Laura’s separation from the

public does not automatically imply the private; such a space does not exist for her.696

Like an unwanted item of furniture, the name (and attached personality) ‘Laura’ is

‘put away’ – perhaps even from Laura herself:

Caroline did not know what the children would do without their Aunt Lolly.

Every one spoke of her as Aunt Lolly, till in the course of time she had almost

forgotten her baptismal name.697

The iterated speech act which works fantastically in The Love-Child and Miss

Hargreaves here enacts an enforced metamorphosis upon Laura’s identity. In this

excerpt ‘she’, in the midst of a narrative focalised through Caroline’s thoughts, is

ambiguous. It is not clear whether it is Caroline or Laura herself who is forgetting the

name Laura; an ambiguity which furthers the dislocation of Laura’s selfhood. Rather

than a masculine imposition, though, the name ‘Lolly’ is attributed by a niece698

– and

Warner is paratextually complicit, in giving the novel its title (while still referring to

‘Laura’ in the narrative.) Nor is Laura the only member of the Willowes household to

have an enforced appellation: Titus is called Tito by his mother.699

Garrity’s

comment that women are ‘exiled from linguistic self-definition’700

cannot be solely

applied to women in Lolly Willowes. Both Laura/Lolly and Titus/Tito are defined by

who is speaking to them or conceiving of them, and domestic conversation becomes

an act of placement, but one where ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ are not necessarily aligned

695

Quoted in Gan, Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing p.5 696

Wendy Gan writes astutely about the role of privacy in the novel, recognising that Laura has

‘privacy at the core of her new identity’, and argues for the primacy of this motivation in her escapes

both from urbanity and, later, from nephew Titus. However, Gan sees the novel as ultimately

triumphant; a reading which sidelines the limitations of Laura’s ‘escape’. [Ibid. p.83] 697

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.60 698

Ibid. p.59 699

Ibid. p.156 700

Garrity, Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary p.159

223

with positive and negative. Names which seem intended to demarcate the insider

actually ascribe a personality and a role.

Later in the novel, the linguistic metamorphosis of these parallel names reflects

Laura’s dual identities of relative and witch:

If she had been called upon to decide in cold blood between being an aunt and

being a witch, she might have been overawed by habit and the cowardice of

compunction. But in the moment of election, under the stress and turmoil of the

hunted Lolly as under a covering of darkness, the true Laura had settled it all

unerringly.701

This excerpt incorporates various contesting linguistic frameworks, to indicate the

myriad personalities and assigned traits competing at this point. The language of

Freudianism here hovers close to that of schizophrenia, where ‘Laura’ has taken

unconscious actions unbeknownst to ‘Lolly’. Yet the moment is given both a

religious, vocational construction (‘called upon’; ‘moment of election’) and legal

terminology which echoes the contract Laura has made with Satan. And throughout,

the spectre of the Gothic remains, in the depiction of a hunted woman in darkness.

The language of settlement (and the passage is also suggestive of the settling of a

property or estate) is, ironically, unsettled and unsettling.

The roles she exchanges are, however, not woman and witch, or even spinster and

witch, but aunt and witch. It is the divesting of the persona of aunt, with its attendant

responsibilities and dependencies, which is the process of almost unconscious self-

recreation taken by Laura.

701

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.175

224

‘One of these floating aunts’702

In her position as aunt, Laura exists only in relation to others. She is not dependent

on the Willowes family simply for room and board, but for the framework of her

identity. The house and family lend a legitimacy to the spinster, enabling (or forcing)

her to be part of a functioning machine. This was a position held by many of those

‘two million spinsters’ identified by reviewers as the ideal readers of this novel: ‘How

many spinster ladies, living, perhaps, unwelcome guests with well-meaning relatives,

will not sympathise with Lolly Willowes?’703

a reviewer for The Queen asks, while

that of the Evening Standard notes (with perhaps rather unsuitable allusion to

Matthew 18:20) that Lolly Willowes ‘is discussed with rapture where two or three

modern spinsters are gathered together’.704

Reference to ‘modern spinsters’ does not

connote the emancipated and progressive, but instead those for whom emancipation

and progression had begun to seem a possibility. Laura Willowes is emphatically

typical in her middle-class situation – ‘so usual a person; she is to be met with in

every village in the country’705

– and Lolly Willowes is, indeed, the only one of

Warner’s seven novels to be set in twentieth-century Britain, given Warner’s usual

‘persuasion that I was best at home in times past’.706

The metaphor she chooses here

is particularly pertinent, since it is precisely the feeling of being (or not being) ‘at

home’ which pervades Lolly Willowes, with the ideal home connoting not only

comfort but a sense of belonging and an untroubled reflection of the inhabitant’s

chosen identity, rather than that foisted upon her by her relatives.

702

Eyles, Unmarried But Happy p.75 703

The Queen (17/2/26), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University

of Reading 704

Evening Standard (27/12/26), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926),

University of Reading. The reference is to “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am

in the midst of them.” (Authorised Version) 705

C.H.W., 'Review of Lolly Willowes' p.327 706

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Sylvia Townsend Warner Archives (F(right)/66/6), Dorset Country

Museum

225

Laura is unwelcome to her sister-in-law, but Caroline fools herself that ‘Laura too was

loved, and Laura was necessary. Caroline did not know what the children would do

without their Aunt Lolly.’707

Repetition of ‘Laura’ here, for two quite disparate

qualities, is further indication of her divided selfhood. Both attributes are, in fact,

determined from outside: love and requirement are familial and mechanical

respectively, but both define Laura through the actions and emotions of others.

Privileging the role of aunt over that of sister or sister-in-law, Laura is seemingly

placed in a relationship with her niece and nephew, but in the interwar years ‘aunt’

often acted as an abbreviation for a job description extending beyond the remit of the

children, as exemplified in Scharlieb’s The Bachelor Woman and Her Problems:

Is she not the one human being above all others on whom we can rely and

count, just the one not too much involved in her own joys, sorrows, inevitable

duties and engagements, to be able, indeed delighted, to come forward to give a

helping hand and a sympathizing glance in all the trials and perplexities of the

world?708

Is she not, Scharlieb implies, devoid of personal identity, and ready to have one

formed for her? (It is determinedly ‘her’ and ‘she’ in this passage, rather than ‘we’ or

‘us’: the aunt is unequivocally an ‘other’.) Just as Laura has an unhealthily dependent

relationship with the confines of the house, so the household is dependent upon her,

while promoting the image of Laura as dependent relative. They have a symbiotic

interdependence, but one which permits Henry, Caroline, Titus, and Fancy (Laura’s

niece) to be ‘at home’ and to have the parallel independence which is forbidden to

Laura. To use a spatial model suggested by Lefebvre :

707

Warner, Lolly Willowes pp.59f 708

Scharlieb, The Bachelor Woman and Her Problems pp.76f

226

Social space contains - and assigns (more or less) appropriate places to - (1) the

social relations of reproduction, i.e. the bio-physiological relations between the

sexes and between age groups, along with the specific organization of the

family; and (2) the relations of production, i.e. the division of labour and its

organization in the form of hierarchical social functions.709

The space of the Willowes house uncertainly offers and denies both these ‘relations’

to Laura. She is simultaneously within the family and outside it; a labourer and

unrecognised as a labourer. If Lefebvre’s models offer the organic and the

mechanical in turn, Laura cannot claim either for herself. Her identity is

overdetermined but undervalued, and her escape from the Willowes’ house is chiefly

an escape from a space where her identity is myriad but not under her control. In a

1927 article, Warner suggested that there was a ‘moral and metaphorical tincture’710

to choosing a house; Laura has this choice taken from her, and with this the

concomitant opportunity to choose an identity. Inhabiting a home is an act of self-

creation, but by living with relatives Laura is at the mercy of the identity her family –

effectively her creators – determine for her.

Also in 1927 Winifred Holtby observed that the Wollstonecraftian treatise

“A Vindication of the Rights of Aunts” remains yet unwritten. Perhaps one day

the creator of Miss Laura Willowes, who understood so well the ardours and

endurances of her position, will pass from the tale of the individual revolt to the

general position of aunts in society.711

For the figure of the aunt held not simply private, individual positions within homes,

but existed as a generalised and identifiable concept with its own role in the

organisation of society. L.P. Hartley writes that Laura ‘had become a Professional

709

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974

trans.1991) p.32 710

Sylvia Townsend Warner, 'On Choosing a Country Residence' Time and Tide, 17/06/27 (1927) 568-

569, p.568 711

Winifred Holtby, 'The Truth About Aunts' Time and Tide, 03/06/27 (1927) 520-521, p.520

227

Aunt’,712

reminiscent of the Universal Aunt company which was established in 1921

and took on many roles – ‘anything for anyone at any time’713

– which were otherwise

assumed by financially dependent relatives. These included governess, dressmaker,

and companion, but when Warner herself describes the company – in a 1950 article –

she fancifully includes ‘meet[ing] the pet, though rather excitable hyæna at the

railway terminus’ and finding ‘a suitable wedding present for a K.C.’714

A

professional company took on this familial name in order to make the inclusion of

strangers in one’s home seem less alien, but there is an equal effect in the other

direction, whereby the aunt takes on the distancing connotations of the institutional

adjunct.

As well as this institutionalised figure of the spinster aunt, she existed as a shorthand

stereotype defined angrily by Holtby as ‘timid, ineffective and oppressed, at best a

snapper-up of unconsidered trifles of affection’.715

These are the qualities Henry and

Caroline falsely identify in Laura: ‘they felt no need to question her, since they could

be sure that she would do nothing unsuitable or extravagant.’716

Their responses to

her departure are incredulity and discouragement, while any indications of witchcraft

are wholly ignored as too socially transgressive to be believed possible in the docile

relative they have conceived of (and, in doing so, created). Laura is representative of

the public and private faces of the 1920s aunt in being thought to be unshocking and

compliant,717

but only acknowledged with the sanctioning structure of the family; the

712

Hartley, 'New Fiction' p.165 713

http://www.universalaunts.co.uk/history.html (Accessed 5th September 2013) 714

Sylvia Townsend Warner, 'Something About Aunts' in Peter Tolhurst (ed.) With The Hunted:

Selected Writings (Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2012) 369-372, p.371 715

Holtby, 'The Truth About Aunts' p.520 716

Warner, Lolly Willowes pp.78f 717

In 1950 Warner would suggest that aunts in literature ‘have shed their benignity and become

increasingly macabre’, but this was far from true in 1926. [Warner, 'Something About Aunts' p.371]

228

‘femme sole and self supporting,’ as Warner writes in protest at being asked to attend

the Labour Exchange in 1944, has ‘no more claim to consideration than a biscuit.’718

Without the legitimisation of the family unit (however much this trammels the aunt’s

identity) the single woman is empirically not analysable or placeable for the wider

public.

‘Family’, of course, shares an etymological root with ‘familiarity’ (and reappears

later, subverted, as the witch’s ‘familiar’). Familiarity tends to correspond with the

comfortable, settled, and harmless – yet, ensconced in the family home, Laura

experiences a reversal of the ‘unheimlich’: her fear is not the familiar being made

unfamiliar, but rather the familiar becoming over-familiar. These are her thoughts

when she first moves to her brother’s house:

She would become an inmate of the tall house in Apsley Terrace where hitherto

she had only been a country sister-in-law on a visit. She would recognise a

special something in the physiognomy of the house-front which would enable

her to stop certainly before it without glancing at the number of the door-

knocker. Within it, she would know unhesitatingly which of the polished brown

doors was which, and become quite indifferent to the position of the cistern,

which had baffled her one night when she lay awake trying to assemble the

house inside the box of its outer walls.719

Laura initially has a fractured understanding of the house, and undergoes an analytical

process, trying to comprehend the way in which it coheres – either as a product (for

‘assembl[ing] the house inside the box’ is redolent of a manufactured dollhouse) or, as

the word ‘physiognomy’ connotes, recognising the house as a person. Yet she

recognises that the matching of the interior and exterior of the house is not only

achievable but inevitable and inescapable. Unlike the Gothic houses which played

718

Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell, Letters (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982) p.84 719

Warner, Lolly Willowes pp.3f

229

tricks with misleading architecture (also seen in David Lindsay’s 1922 fantastic novel

The Haunted Woman, where the house expands and contracts inside without altering

its external structure, including a disappearing and re-appearing staircase leading to an

alternative world, instantly forgotten on return), the Willowes’ house is ineluctably

stable and sensible. Laura’s fears are thus that the house is too knowable; that, as an

‘inmate’ – a word with a self-evident negative connotation, which notably

accompanies the transition from sister-in-law to aunt – she will have no choice but to

become familiar with every aspect of the geography of the house.

Even in Great Mop, in her initial ill-fated attempt to learn and memorise the

countryside as she has learnt the layout of the house, this over-familiarity threatens to

ruin her potential haven:

She walked slowly, for she felt the weight of her chains. Once more they had

been fastened upon her. She had worn them for many years, acquiescently,

scarcely feeling their weight. Now she felt it. And, with their weight, she felt

their familiarity, and the familiarity was worst of all.720

The metaphor of chains is obvious, yet here the metaphor threatens to become real.

The projected image is already affecting her physically, and stilting the way she

walks, rather than existing only in her mind. The fantastic is also inherently an

antidote to familiarity, offering the unexpected and unpredictable; the destruction of

the familiar structures of the domestic novel is also the destruction of Laura’s

burdensome domestic familiarity.

It is not only the architecture and organised space of the home that influence Laura’s

identity, but the domestic objects within it. As Rosemary Sykes notes, it is ‘the

720

Ibid. p.154

230

contents of the Willowes[’] houses (especially the furniture and the books) that

regulate the Willowes[’] traditions’.721

These objects echo the stasis of the layout of

the house, inflexible to the changing humans within and creating their own linear

Willowes history; Laura, having already been treated as furniture, is expected to be

similarly static once she has been put in her place. A similar house circumscribes the

spinster protagonist in F.M. Mayor’s The Rector’s Daughter: ‘Not a new piece of

furniture had been bought in the house within Mary’s memory, not a room had been

papered or painted’.722

The lack of excitement or growth in the unmarried daughter is

reflected in the décor and furnishings which surround her. Only the arrival or final

departure of an inhabitant permits any change in the physical arrangement of objects.

At Laura’s aptly-named childhood home Lady Place, after their mother’s funeral her

brother James ‘did a thing so unprecedented in the annals of the family that it could

only be explained by the extreme exaltation of mind which possessed him: for without

consulting any one, he altered the furniture, transferring a mirror and an almond-green

brocade settee from his mother’s room to his own.’723

Since the ‘annals of the family’

are arbitrated by the furniture, this act disrupts the Willowes’ tradition, and is in turn

considered to reflect a disruption of James’ sanity, however temporary.

An anxiety about the placement of domestic objects is seen through middlebrow

fiction; it preoccupies the Provincial Lady from the opening page of her diaries, where

she worries about indoor bulbs occupying a chair (and which are later transferred

from cellar to attic, emblematising the anxiety about domestic flux.) Similarly, in

Macaulay’s Crewe Train, Denham is alienated from upper-middleclass society by

their predilection for arranging furniture and ornaments: ‘She felt listless, and did not

721

Sykes, 'The Willowes Pattern' p.1 722

F.M. Mayor, The Rector's Daughter (London: Hogarth Press, 1924) p.7 723

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.21

231

care whether the bureau stood against the window wall or the opposite one, or

whether the Cézanne looked its best over the fireplace or elsewhere’.724

In these

novels without the determined stasis of the Willowes family, furniture can be moved,

but always with the sense that there is a ‘correct’ and final place for it, as though

rearranging pieces of a dollhouse to assemble the ideal home.

Domestic objects can also be revelatory about their owners. In ‘Property of a Lady’

Warner writes of the lady that ‘all things belonging to her must look like the property

of a lady, it was their doom and hers’, and Warner wrote to a friend that ‘An old

teapot, used daily, can tell me more of my past than anything I recorded of it.’725

The

possibility of being analysed by one’s objects, even when one is not present, is an

invasive element of inhabiting a domesticated space, and these objects semiotically

designate their owners and users, acting (like Miss Hargreaves’ appendages and

Clarissa’s clothes) like props representing and establishing character. The

relationship between owner, object, and observer is further destabilised when (as in

Laura’s case) the house is not one’s own. Daniel Miller suggests that possessions are

haunted by personalities and personal histories; ‘[t]he very durability and physicality

of things make them liable to represent attributes which were not those that an

individual desired them to convey’.726

Miller uses an essentially Freudian model of

conscious and unconscious, the former being concretised into tangible commodities.

(Freud’s own room, ironically, was described as being ‘cluttered with objects’.)727

724

Macaulay, Crewe Train p.248 725

Sylvia Townsend Warner, 'The Property of a Lady' The New Statesman and Nation, 14/08/33 (1933)

444-445, p.444; Warner and Harman, The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner p.vi. For further

discussion of the ways in which possessions are haunted by people/relationships/personal history, see

Daniel Miller, 'Possessions' in Daniel Miller (ed.) Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed

Doors (Oxford: Berg, 2001) 107-121 726

Miller, 'Possessions' p.120 727

Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms That Shaped Them (New York;

London: Routledge, 2004) p.78

232

This trope is taken to fantastic extremes in Harriet Hume, subverting domestic

iconography. The eponymous heroine of Harriet Hume can hear the thoughts of

others, principally her would-be lover Arnold Condorex. The novel is ambivalently

on the edge of the middlebrow, sidelined by the Provincial Lady:

Am asked what I think of Harriet Hume but am unable to say, as I have not read

it. Have a depressed feeling that this is going to be another case of Orlando

about which I was perfectly able to talk most intelligently until I read it, and

found myself unfortunately unable to understand any of it.728

As with Leavis’ ‘Ethel M. Dell’, and Priestley’s ‘wolf’, the ‘case of Orlando’ acts as

symbolic shorthand – and in this phraseology, effectively a diagnosis. The shorthand

is explained: the ‘case’ is of a difficult novel that she is unable to discuss (the cardinal

sin of middlebrow literary reception), at least once she has read it. It is unclear

whether the difficulty lies in the fantastic content of Orlando and Harriet Hume or the

experimental manner in which it is presented in these novels; actual receptive

engagement is lost in the layers of disingenuousness, self-effacement, and humour

which Delafield casts over the ‘confession’. In either case, it is evident that these

novels are not considered the property of the middlebrow, nor a point of shared

identification (except in amused rejection). Yet Harriet Hume still engages with the

trope of the organisation of domestic objects, which has currency in both middlebrow

and highbrow literature – Humble notes that ‘domestic space is described in

obsessive, coded detail’729

in middlebrow novels between the 1920s and 1950s, and

this is one of the more obvious places where middlebrow and modernism overlap.

728

Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.5 729

Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s p.108

233

Harriet’s domestic possessions are not only a representation of herself (as Warner and

Miller suggest everyone’s possessions must be), but also the representation of her

psychic ability. The second occasion of Harriet’s telepathy revolves around

Condorex’s thoughts about a ‘box on the mantelshelf […] a very nice piece of Early

Victorian foolishness, lacquered papier-mâché sprayed with mother-of-pearl flowers

and golden leaves.’730

He assesses and systematises her life from this microcosm –

‘the little things in her house were all so much better than the big’ – and tries to gage

her class from her objects, faltering at her empty bookshelf. It is this scene which

Harriet has witnessed, telepathically, at a distance: ‘“I was in your mind.”’731

Briganti

and Mezei suggest that domestic objects are ‘an archive of memory’;732

here they are

more than that. The box becomes the loci for their minds, an archive for all mental

engagement, and his non-fantastic investigation is paralleled in her fantastic telepathy.

West uses this innocuous object to demonstrate, even in telepathy, the subjectivity of

individual analysis, and the limitation of semiotics: Condorex’s detailed, somewhat

patronising inspection of the article is reflected as ‘my pretty box’ in Harriet’s

account. (In his memory, when the event is faultily recalled, Condorex borrows the

same vague adjective: ‘“that very pretty day.”’)733

His extensive, invasive reading of

Harriet’s furnishings heightens them, and imbues these objects with talismanic

significance; he makes an unbreakable association between the woman and her

possessions. His reading cannot be authorially condemned, since West twists the

scene around to perform the same association: the box itself incorporates materials

disguised as flowers and leaves, uncannily pretending to be natural in the same way

730

West, Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy p.15 731

Ibid. p.27 732

Briganti and Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E.H. Young p.51 733

West, Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy p.94

234

that Harriet cloaks a supernatural ability within a natural frame. Harriet Hume

undermines the safety of the home, not merely through questioning the inviolability of

boundaries (spatial and psychological) but by elevating the significance of domestic

articles beyond their geography. A middlebrow emphasis upon furnishings is thus

subverted to an uneasy overdetermination; there are, as Warner writes in her diary,

‘[n]o possible counter-sallies against the inanimate’:734

they expose the owner to

scrutiny, or impel the observer to an automatic analytical process, with little room for

defence or volition.

These objects are not simply revelatory, but can act transformatively. Laura

Willowes’ sensitivity to environment means that she is aware that an alteration in

domestic surroundings is akin to a change in self: ‘sleeping in a smart brass bedstead

instead of her old and rather pompous four-poster, wearing unaccustomed clothes and

performing unaccustomed duties, she seemed to herself to have become a different

person.’735

She is preternaturally aware that surroundings and the presence of objects

are not passive, but affect and reflect the personality, and have a personality of their

own. A bed is anthropomorphised as ‘pompous’, and the adjective ‘unaccustomed’

could (syntactically) refer equally to Laura’s unfamiliarity with the clothes and duties,

or the clothes’ and duties’ own inexperience, animating these inanimate quantities.736

Laura is also physically marked by the house. She gets chilblains, and while

embroidering, ‘[e]ach time that a strand of silk rasped against her fingers she

734

Warner and Harman, The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner p.71 735

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.61 736

Clothes also play a significant role in Orlando’s transformation, with the narrative of Orlando

putting forward the idea that ‘it is clothes that wear us and not we them’, and also the contrasting view

that ‘[c]lothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath.’ [Woolf, Orlando p.180] In Laura’s

case, the clothes cannot eradicate that which is ‘deep beneath’ the surface – in terms of independence,

rather than gender – but they do mask and, at this point, subsume it.

235

shuddered inwardly.’737

This marking by the house and household duties

foreshadows the mark believed to be found on the body of a witch, as noted by

Margaret Murray in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: ‘The ceremony concluded by

giving the witch a mark or 'flesh-brand' on some part of the body.’738

‘A Constant Flux’:739

the quasi-metamorphosis of Laura Willowes

The branding of Laura by the house is one example of an iterated trope in the novel,

writ large in the novel’s overall transition from a traditional domestic novel (often

compared to Jane Austen)740

into the fantastic: that of quasi-metamorphosis. Just as

Laura becomes a witch but remains, in many essentials, the same character, so the

leitmotif of combined changing and not-changing recurs throughout. Quasi-

metamorphosis is not the static image of the partial or fragmented, rather it is an

incomplete process – one that is begun, but stalls before reaching the point of absolute

metamorphosis; Laura is a changing entity, but never a fully-changed one. Warner

writes in ‘Women as Writers’ of

[…] bi-location. It is well known that a woman can be in two places at once; at

her desk and at her washing-machine. […] Her mind is so extensive that it can

simultaneously follow a train of thought, remember what it was she had to tell

the electrician, answer the telephone, keep an eye on the time, and not forget

about the potatoes.741

737

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.45; p.46. Chilblains as a form of marking is noted by Nesbitt, 'Footsteps

of Red Ink: Body and Landscape in Lolly Willowes' p.457 738

Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology p.76 739

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.193 740

Contemporary reviewers noted that Warner had ‘a Jane Austen kind of humour’, an Austenesque

‘sly and almost subdued comedy’ and ‘exquisite poise’, and ‘a irony as subtle as Jane Austen’s’.

[Christopher Morley, Saturday Review of Literature (6/2/26); Edwin Clark, ‘Perfect Portrait of a

Maiden Aunt’, New York Times (7/2/26); The Times (N.Y.) (27/6/26); M.S.P., Dublin Review (July-

Sept 1926), all Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of

Reading] Warner herself called Austen ‘a completely worldly artist’. [Sylvia Townsend Warner, 'Jane

Austen', in The British Council and The National Book League (eds.), (London: Longmans, Green &

Co., 1951) p.7] 741

Sylvia Townsend Warner, 'Women as Writers (1959)' in Bonnie Kine Scott (ed.) The Gender of

Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington; Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990)

538-546, p.540. Garrity borrows the term ‘bi-location’ in her chapter ‘Encoding Bi-location: Sylvia

236

Warner starts by discussing multiple activities, but transfers these ‘locations’ into the

mind, emphasising the elasticity of its boundaries. The examples Warner chooses

would not be out of place in Delafield’s Provincial Lady books, and refer to examples

which, if not exclusively middlebrow, certainly resonate with that audience. For

Laura, moments of bi-location prefigure her eventual quasi-metamorphosis into witch,

occurring most significantly in the florist where she first decides to move to the

countryside, where iteration of ‘she forgot’ demonstrates the extent to which place

and placement are mental constructs for Laura, vulnerable to imaginative

manipulation:

As Laura stood waiting she felt a great longing. It weighed upon her like the

load of ripened fruit upon a tree. She forgot the shop, the other customers, her

own errand. She forgot the winter air outside, the people going by on the wet

pavements. She forgot that she was in London, she forgot the whole of her

London life. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet

in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers

seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves.742

Laura creates a projected ideal, having started with the innocuous jars, devising (like

Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’) the narrative behind a simple object, and imagines

herself to be the ‘solitary old woman’ who may have picked the fruit that filled the

jars, ‘standing with arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself’.743

Images of (potential) arboreal metamorphoses also recur in Warner’s poetry. In her

first volume, The Espalier, ‘Wish in Spring’ includes the line towards the end: ‘To-

Townsend Warner and the Primitive Erotics of Sapphic Dissimulation’, but understands it slightly

differently from my interpretation, ultimately using it to allege the significance of lesbianism in Lolly

Willowes. [Garrity, Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary

p.149; p.144] 742

Warner, Lolly Willowes pp.83f 743

Ibid. p.83

237

day I wish that I were a tree / and not myself’,744

while in Time Importuned, a woman

appears to fall in love with a tree in ‘The Espousal’: ‘[…] looked up into the throng /

Of boughs as looking up into a husband’s face.’745

Warner treats all these images as

the logical outcome of an affinity with nature, but these illustrations of

metamorphosis are always incomplete, being foreshortened by the marks of simile

(‘as though’), imagination (‘seemed to be’), or aspiration (‘I wish’). Alongside the

quasi-metamorphoses is the image of Eve and her fatal reaching for the apple, thus

foreshadowing the eventual entrance of Satan in the novel. Laura later makes the

comparison with Eve herself, because Mr. Saunter reminds her of Adam.746

The

image of the apple recurs throughout the novel, associated with the displaced Aunt

Emmy returning from India (‘Emmy picked up the windfall apples and ate them with

the greed of the exile’) and acquisitive Titus (‘how greedily he was eating that

apple’).747

It acts like a domestic possession, exposing the qualities of the possessor.

The bi-location of the scene is, of course, the dual locations of shop and orchard,

overlaid as competing environments, and yet both are individually liminal spaces,

offering alternatives to the home: the shop is dressed like a home, but is not one; the

orchard is obviously not an inherently domestic place, but it is treated as one through

Laura’s project version of it. The ‘pattern of leaves and fruit’, with its neatly

interspersed ‘rounded ovals’ and ‘pointed ovals’ is suggestive of a wooden carving or

a recurring pattern in a tapestry; an imitation rather than the actual thing. The

wildness and wilderness which some critics identify in Laura’s escape to the

744

Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Espalier (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925) p.6 745

Warner, Time Importuned p.13 746

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.132. David Garnett extends this image to the novel as a whole, writing ‘I

have just read Lolly Willowes – and I like it so much that I feel it almost indelicate to tell you how

much – an embarrassment which Adam may have felt in thanking God for Eve.’ [Warner, Garnett, and

Garnett, Sylvia and David: The Townsend Warner/Garnett Letters p.26] 747

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.27; p.91

238

countryside is actually regulated by the ordered and domesticated version of the

natural which impels Laura’s move. This pattern both echoes and replaces the

systemised tradition in which she has been encumbered; Laura is abandoning one

pattern and creating a new one.

‘The bugaboo surmises of the public’:748

subverting stereotypes of the witch

Although the ongoing thread of houses and spatial dependencies frames Laura’s

motivation for inviting the fantastic, the most significant moment in the

metamorphosis/creation narrative is Laura’s transformation into a witch. This takes

place (notably) nine months after she has moved to the village of Great Mop. If

moving was a form of conceiving her new life, becoming a witch is the eventual birth.

It is the quintessential quasi-metamorphosis in Lolly Willowes, shown by the latent

indications of Laura’s ‘witchiness’ which are carried across the fantastic divide into

her new realisation of self. ‘Even in the old days of Lady Place the impulse had

stirred in her.’749

For instance, Laura has a ‘hook nose’ and ‘sharp chin’, writes a

book recommending herbs medicinally, and has ‘inherited a fancy for brewing.’750

Playing with the witch-with-cauldron image, which later in the novel Warner resists

and subverts, she identifies the overlap between witchcraft and the spinster who is

simply interested in nature.751

748

Ibid. p.175 749

Ibid. p.176 750

Ibid. p.59; p.31 751

Warner herself had a similar interest in herbs, listening sixteen she considered essential in an article

on countryside living – Oliver Warner described her as ‘essentially a rebel’, but one with a paradoxical

‘knowledge of the domestic crafts – of herbs and cookery.’ [Sylvia Townsend Warner, 'I Cook On Oil'

in J.W. Robertson Scott (ed.) The Countryman Book (London: Odhams Press, 1948) 136-138; Warner,

'Sylvia Townsend Warner' p.9]

239

The cultural image of the witch may be subverted in Lolly Willowes, but it is always

present as a stereotype to distort. L.P. Hartley writes that ‘Miss Willowes ought to

have been either more or less a witch. She has the temperament, critical, wayward,

unsociable, without the credentials. She is not eldritch enough.’752

His demand for an

eldritch witch reflects the preponderance of the witch-figure in cultural and popular

knowledge. Lolly Willowes itself mentions the image of ‘the witch, who lived alone

in the wood, her cottage window all grown over with brambles’.753

(It is unclear, at

this point, whether this is observed by the narrator or part of Laura’s indirect

discourse.) This presentation of the witch is certainly that which predominates in

other witchcraft novels of the interwar period. Stella Benson’s Living Alone is

humorous, rather than ‘eldritch’, but her witches have broomsticks and reincarnate,

and the author’s note proudly (if facetiously) states that ‘This is not a real book. It

does not deal with real people, nor should it be read by real people.’754

The title,

Living Alone, initially appears to suggest some similarities with Warner’s treatment of

the spatiality of the spinster aunt, but ‘Living Alone’ is, in fact, the name of a

somewhat eccentric boarding house for witches – a community with fiercely resists

community: ‘guests must spend at least eighteen hours out of the twenty-four entirely

alone. No guest may entertain or be entertained except under special licence’.755

The

novel is too peculiar and satirical to present a genuine call for spatial independence.

Glen Cavaliero lists other practitioners of novels about witchcraft in the 1920s and

‘30s, describing Benfield’s Bachelor’s Knap (1935) as ‘torrid’, Frances Carmichael’s

The Witch of Brent (1934) as ‘restrained’, and noting that Charlotte M. Peake’s 1923

752

Hartley, 'New Fiction' p.165 753

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.147 754

Stella Benson, Living Alone (Gloucester: Dodo Press, 1919 repr.2007) p.8; p.11; p.[i] 755

Ibid. p.14

240

novel Pagan Corner ‘focuse[s] on the psychology of witchcraft’, but not with any

great literary success.756

Kate Macdonald similarly identifies a ‘significant cultural

phase […for] works dealing with witchcraft’757

in the 1920s, noting works by ten

other authors, and arguing that the neglect of these works – and the critical focus upon

Warner’s other novels – is because ‘witches are not generally academically

respectable.’758

It is also probable that other contemporary novelists were simply not

as (re)inventive with their witch characters, and left less for later critical analysis,

because the witch (unlike the fantastic creator) was so firmly established as a

recognisable cultural referent. As such, the witch is found often in encyclopaedic

delineations of the fantastic. Penzoldt writes, ‘[m]ore than all other supernatural

figures, the witch has been transformed and idealised in literature.’759

As one

reviewer noted at the time of publication,

[t]he orthodox witch of fiction is – or was – a specimen of one of two distinct

types: either the hairy, hideous hag, moustached and nut-crackered, bearing the

outward signs of her evil trafficking for all to see, or else a handsome, black-

haired, green-eyed sinister beauty, whose loveliness was that of some fair but

poisonous flower.760

He adds that Laura Willowes is, instead, ‘simply a quite delightful aunt’. Although

Warner resists these caricatures of the bewitching woman (in both senses of

‘bewitching’), the qualities Hartley anticipates from the archetypal witch (of a

‘critical, wayward, unsociable’ temperament) are also those commonly associated

756

Glen Cavaliero, The Rural Tradition in the English Novel, 1900-1939 (London: Macmillan, 1977)

p.40. Peake’s novel concentrates on the rural influence upon witchcraft and, like Laura, its heroine

Polly is initially called by Nature: ‘The earth herself sets her mark on some, and she can call and guard

her own.’ [C.M.A. Peake, Pagan Corner (London: Methuen, 1923) p.27] 757

Kate Macdonald, 'Witchcraft and Non-conformity in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes

(1926) and John Buchan's Witch Wood (1927)' Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 23/2 (2012) 215-

238, p.215 758

Ibid. p.219 759

Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction pp.43f 760

‘An Apology for Witchcraft’, Bolton Evening News (18/5/26), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/34

(Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of Reading

241

with the figure of the spinster aunt. The idea of spinster-as-outsider (even within her

own home, should she live with relatives) is taken to its extreme in the witch, and a

linguistic overlap for the commonalities between spinster and witch, to which the

narrative often returns, is the word ‘odd’.

‘Odd’ indicates both the strange and the superfluous, and there are many similarities

between Laura Willowes and ‘the very odd creature’761

Miss Ogilvy, of Radclyffe

Hall’s ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’, which was written shortly after Lolly Willowes

though not published until 1934. Miss Ogilvy decides on a whim (‘“I’m off!” she

announced abruptly one day’) to go to an island off Devon.762

Like Warner, Hall

constructs her narrative around a metamorphosis inspired by the pre-modern – Miss

Ogilvy morphs into a caveman – but, unlike Warner, Hall’s metamorphosis is

accompanied by an alteration of the period in which the story is set, to prehistoric

time, rather than an atavistic transformation taking place alongside contemporary

society. While ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’ is clearly a coded depiction of

lesbianism, Lolly Willowes uses ‘oddness’ to connote and discuss a wider subset of

unmarried women and, when she moves to Great Mop, is pleased that the fellow

witches ‘do not mind if you are a little odd in your ways’.763

Yet, Laura’s seeming victory is only partly due to being surrounded by others equally

odd (thus altering the localised concept of normality). Chiefly it is indifference

(foreshadowing the final line of the novel, regarding Satan’s ‘satisfied but profoundly

761

Radclyffe Hall, 'Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself' Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (London: William

Heinemann, 1934) 3-34, p.8 762

Ibid. p.17 763

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.246

242

indifferent ownership’)764

which leads to Laura’s freedom in this area. Unlike The

Corner That Held Them or Summer Will Show, Lolly Willowes is a novel wherein, as

Bruce Knoll points out, ‘Warner allows Laura no community of any kind’,765

and

there cannot be said to be any sort of utopian feminist sisterhood: it must be

remembered that the sorority of witches is also a fraternity of warlocks (even if Laura

‘can’t take warlocks so seriously’766

), and Mr. Saunter is as close a companion as any

of the women Laura encounters in the village.

Lolly Willowes addresses the spinster-as-witch conceit overtly:

“Think of Miss Carloe! She’s a typical witch, people would say. Really she’s

the typical genteel spinster who’s spent herself being useful to people who

didn’t want her.”767

The metamorphosis of self at the centre of Lolly Willowes is undermined by the idea

that Laura was already of the witch species. As aforementioned, G.K. Chesterton

argues in an essay on ‘Magic and Fantasy in Fiction’ that ‘black magic is that which

blots out or disguises the true form of a thing; while white magic, in the good sense,

restores it to its own form and not another.’768

In Laura’s case, the distinctions of

white and black magic which Chesterton borrows from fairy-tale and myth are not

applicable. Transformation paradoxically acts as a restoration – or, more accurately,

the uncovering and fulfilling – of her personality. Her physical form does not change,

but the more complex and subtle sphere of Laura’s identity can be revivified. Having

764

Ibid. p.247 765

Bruce Knoll, '"An Existence Doled Out": Passive Resistance as a Dead End in Sylvia Townsend

Warner's Lolly Willowes' Twentieth Century Literature, 39/3 (1993) 344-363, p.361 766

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.134 767

Ibid. p.239. Similarly, in Edith Olivier’s memoir of her sister Mildred, she writes ‘[b]uilt into the

garden wall was a tiny cottage, and in this cottage lived an old woman who looked like a witch’ and

Mildred and her friends played ‘pretending they saw her fly off her broomstick every night.’ [Edith

Olivier, 'Mildred Olivier' Mildred (Shaftesbury: High House Press, 1926) 1-18, pp.13f] 768

Chesterton, 'Magic and Fantasy in Fiction' p.161

243

previously been determined by set patterns, transformation allows her to follow a new

pattern of living, but one closer to her innate personality (albeit not patterns which

ultimately allow her absolute freedom).

Within Lolly Willowes, Laura considers witchcraft almost inevitable for those

spinsters who have been considered entirely unshocking, and subjugated to an

imposed stereotype:

[F]or so many, what can there be but witchcraft? That strikes them real. Even

if other people still find them quite safe and usual, and go on poking with them,

they know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary

they are.769

As John Lucas notes, Warner writes ‘strikes them real’ rather than the more

collocative ‘strikes them as real’, labelling this a ‘refusal of simile’.770

Laura has

made the transition from a world of imagery to that where the real has been infiltrated

by the fantastic. It is the inability to be assessed by an outsider – to be ‘incalculable’

– which Laura argues makes the spinster fitted to be a witch. Ironically, the failure to

recognise danger in unmarried women is reflected in reception of Lolly Willowes

itself. Warner wrote to David Garnett (who saw ‘such a passion, a storm’771

in

Laura’s actions) that:

Other people who have seen Lolly have told me that it was charming, that it was

distinguished, and my mother said it was almost as good as Galsworthy. And

my heart sank lower and lower, I felt as though I had tried to make a sword

only to be told what a pretty pattern was on the blade. But you have sent me a

drop of blood.’772

769

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.237 770

John Lucas, 'From Realism to Radicalism: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Patrick Hamilton and Henry

Green in the 1920s' in Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton (eds.) Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of

the English Novel 1900-1930 (Hampshire: Macmillan, 2000) p.208 771

Warner, Garnett, and Garnett, Sylvia and David: The Townsend Warner/Garnett Letters p.26 772

Ibid. p.26

244

Her image is tellingly close to the witch’s familiar in Lolly Willowes, the kitten which

Laura imagines ‘sucked, not milk, but blood’.773

Although in initial reviews she is

more frequently compared to Austen or Walter de la Mare than Galsworthy, and most

of all compared to David Garnett himself, contemporary readers and reviewers did

indeed assert Lolly Willowes ‘charming’, a ‘short, happy novel’, and ‘a demure, rather

audacious joke’.774

Hartley dismisses any idea that Warner ‘set out to make your

flesh creep’, while another reviewer criticises Chatto & Windus’ advertising

campaign for ‘mak[ing] out that this first novel is a sensational story of a witch who

“walked with Satan”’ when it is in fact, yes – ‘charming’.’775

Although Hartley is

right that Lolly Willowes does not belong in a tradition of chilling horror narratives,

some reviewers failed to find any category between Gothic horror and the ‘charming’

domestic novel. Warner’s frustration is that, being clearly outside the remit of the

former, reviewers instantly place her amongst the latter.

Garnett also wrote (to Warner’s American publishers) that she was the ‘first woman

to reveal the spiritual side of the witch-cult […] the psychological craving for witch-

craft’.776

Just as the hypothetical ‘Miss Carloe’ is said to have ‘spent herself’ – as

though her identity were a currency which has run out – Laura explains the lack of

autonomy felt by unmarried women, and the domestic drudgery, which leads them

towards witchcraft:

It is we witches who count. We have more need of you. Women have such

vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon

773

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.171 774

Williams, 'Review of Lolly Willowes' p.78; C.H.W., 'Review of Lolly Willowes' p.326; Naomi

Royde-Smith, 'By The Same Author' Time and Tide, 03/06/27 (1927) 523-524, p.523 775

Hartley, 'New Fiction' p.165; ‘Amiable Witch and Agreeable Devil’, Sheffield Daily Telegraph

(9/4/26), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of Reading 776

Warner, Garnett, and Garnett, Sylvia and David: The Townsend Warner/Garnett Letters pp.27f

245

over; they are so dependent upon others, and their dependence so soon becomes

a nuisance.777

Although, as discussed, the novel is not an unswerving attack on patriarchy (here

again, the dependency is on ‘others’ rather than on men), it is telling that Laura uses

the pronoun ‘we’ for witches and ‘their’ for women; by taking on the identity of the

witch, Laura seemingly relinquished the role of woman and its attached identity.

Whether the nuisance to which Laura refers is suffered by the women or those upon

whom they are dependent – or both – is not clear, but the word ‘nuisance’ is

particularly middlebrow in its understatement: it is hardly a word which seems likely

to provoke eternal questions of the soul. Yet Winifred Holtby writes similarly, about

women at the time of the Reformation, echoing the same language of domestic

dependency despite the obvious cultural differences between the 1920s and the

sixteenth century:

In an age where women were almost entirely relegated to domestic activity, […]

the unmarried girl was inevitably “odd man out.” Independence being almost

unheard of, she had to live in some other woman’s house, and to remain subject

to the will of mother, aunt or sister. […] [S]he might, seeking illicitly for

pleasures lawfully denied her, join the tragic fellowship of witches.778

The phrase ‘odd man out’ masculinises the unmarried girl, and again, becoming a

witch seems to be a denial of the feminine, or the refuge for one who has already been

denied a feminine role. It is striking that Holtby comments upon the imperious will of

‘mother, aunt or sister’ and the confines of ‘some other woman’s house’, rather than a

man’s, reflecting the domestic tyranny Laura feels at the hands of her sisters-in-law.

It is, indeed, the absence of men which Holtby identifies as a catalyst. She suggests

777

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.234 778

Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilisation p.128

246

that these women were seeking ‘ecstasy, power and devotion – which for most of her

companions were provided by their marital experience.’779

In substituting the devil as

a husband figure, Holtby goes further than Warner. There is no suggestion that Laura

and Satan have any carnal relationship. Barbara Brothers has even suggested the

interesting idea that Satan is more aptly akin to a psychologist, listening to Laura’s

‘long reveries’.780

Yet Warner does comment on those tried as witches, referencing

Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, that ‘these witches were

witches for love; that witchcraft was more than Miss Murray’s Dianic cult; it was the

romance of their hard lives, their release from dull futures’.781

Warner uses ‘romance’

in a broad sense; the injection of excitement into their lives, and the opportunity to be

passionate, rather than necessarily amorous. In Laura Willowes, Warner creates a

character whose life is restrictive rather than ‘hard’, and who never lacks the

creativity of imagination. Her transformation is not the result of a paucity of romance

in her character, but the overflow of a creative impulse which resents its spatially-

defined confines.

Warner’s use of Margaret Murray’s 1921 text reflects her wider use of source

material, and her focus upon historiography rather than literature (such as Faustus,

which is never mentioned). Unlike Lady Into Fox and its whimsical allusions to facts

about the traits of foxes ‘well confirmed by Æsop’,782

Lolly Willowes is determinedly

detached from literary precedent, and Warner documents research using solely

779

Ibid. p.128 780

Barbara Brothers, 'Flying the Nets at Forty: Lolly Willowes as Female Bildungsroman' in Laura L.

Doan (ed.) Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in the Twentieth-Century Novel

(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991) 195-212, p.209 781

Quoted in Claire Harman, Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus,

1989) p.59 782

Garnett, Lady into Fox p.13, p.53

247

(purported) non-fiction. She recounts her early interest in witchcraft, in a magazine

coincidentally called Eve:

I was about ten years old, and had begun to find reading a pleasure, when I

happened on a book called “Mackay’s Popular Delusions.” […] It was very

Victorian, rationalistic and superior, and it had a respectable, fusty smell. […]

The writer felt contempt for the witches, but his contempt was qualified by

pity’.783

Warner’s article (though largely in jest; she professes to be a witch herself, and

advocates the use of vacuum cleaners instead of broomsticks) is somewhat unfair in

its critique of Mackay: his contempt is largely reserved for the witch-hunters, and

‘pity’ understates his lament that ‘thousands upon thousands of unhappy persons fell

victims to this cruel and absurd delusion’.784

Yet, in the same way that twentieth-

century creation narratives domesticate the conceit in Frankenstein, Warner uses

accounts of medieval witchcraft and transfers them to the ordinary and commonplace

houses of the middlebrow audience.

While Mackay descried the activities of witch-hunters against innocent women,

Murray discusses women of past centuries who openly confessed to being witches

(but does not consider any period more recent.) Murray also became aware of the use

of her book, receiving a copy of Lolly Willowes from Chatto & Windus, at the advice

of David Garnett,785

and she wrote to Warner appreciatively, calling the novel ‘one of

the finest & most human presentations of a witch that I know.’ Her only qualm was

783

Sylvia Townsend Warner, 'Modern Witches' Eve, 18/08/26 (1926) 331; 366, p.331 784

Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Boston: L.C. Page,

1841 repr.1986) p.463 785

Warner and Maxwell, Letters p.9

248

that the devil in Lolly Willowes ‘is not the devil of the witches but the devil of the

Christians’.786

‘You are too lifelike to be natural’:787

Laura’s Satan

Later critics have called Warner’s Satan ‘sensibly unorthodox rather than satanic’ and

‘a wise, understanding, and gentle protector: not at all the evil creature depicted in

Christian scriptures.’788

Murray is, however, right to suggest that Satan in Lolly

Willowes is that shown in the Bible. Warner’s Satan is not depicted as cartoonishly

evil, but then neither is he in Scripture. When Satan does appear in human form in

the Bible, tempting Jesus in the desert, his guise is precisely the persuasive, wise, and

sympathetic figure used in Lolly Willowes.789

In replicating this figure, Warner’s

fantastic pivot is quietly integrated into the scene of the domestic novel, and when

Laura suggests he is ‘too lifelike to be natural’, she recognises Satan’s hyperreality in

the narrative, making him an uncanny figure simply because he refutes the anticipated

distinction between familiar and unfamiliar which usually accompanies the entrance

of the supernatural.

786

Margaret Murray, letter to Warner (03/02/26), Sylvia Townsend Warner Archives

(Q(LBL)/1/M/26), Dorset County Museum. Murray particularly objected to the sentence which

commented on the ‘success of his [Satan’s] recent battle in Flanders’. Her own view of the witches’

devil was that he ‘was God, manifest and incarnate […] and there are indications that, like many

another god, he was sacrificed for the good of his people.’ [Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western

Europe: A Study in Anthropology p.28] 787

Warner, Lolly Willowes pp.234f 788

Wendy Rowland, 'Paperbacks' Literary Review, December (1993) 13-15, p.15; Knoll, '"An

Existence Doled Out": Passive Resistance as a Dead End in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes'

p.355 789

In another fantastic novel published the same year, Helen Beauclerk’s The Green Lacquer Pavilion,

a character states that ‘“Satan is a great and a noble spirit […] and the foolish monster whom men call

the devil has naught to do with him.”’ As a depiction, it was unsettling but not unique in the 1920s.

[Helen Beauclerk, The Green Lacquer Pavilion (London: Penguin, 1926 repr.1937) p.30]

249

Warner’s Satan does, however, continue the theme of concealed and changing

identities in the novel. The first man Laura thinks is the devil is, in fact, simply a man

in a mask that (in ironic contrast to the fluidity of Satan’s identity) renders him ‘alert

and immobile’.790

When she does encounter Satan, she initially mistakes him for the

gardener, as Mary mistook Jesus shortly after His resurrection. As well as this subtle

Biblical allusion, the conflation of Satan and gardener alludes to the affinity he has

with nature in the novel:

It was a though the grass were in league with him, faithfully playing-up to his

pose of being a quite everyday phenomenon.791

His disguise is to appear ‘everyday’, in ‘gaiters and a corduroy coat’792

– fittingly,

since Murray notes that in accounts of the ‘devil’ appearing in previous centuries, ‘in

ordinary clothes he was indistinguishable from any other man of his own rank or

age’.793

Unlike other depictions of the devil in 1920s fiction, he is resolutely human

in appearance and manner – traits seen later in Dougal Douglas, Muriel Spark’s devil-

character in The Ballad of Peckham Rye.794

As with Warner’s quotidian presentation

of the witch, her commonplace devil met with some protest from reviewers. Edwin

Muir writes that her ‘conception of the devil’ is ‘disappointing. To her, we feel, he is

the devil in much the same sense as Mr. Smith is Mr. Smith. In other words, he is a

person with a name.’795

Naming is far from an innocuous activity in Lolly Willowes,

790

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.200. The idea of the mask may have come from Murray’s book. [Murray,

The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology p.62] 791

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.244 792

Ibid. p.204 793

Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology p.31 794

Although Dougal is not overtly Satan, he has the marks of ‘horns’ on his forehead, and wreaks evil

in a community. Other portrayals of the devil in the 1920s include Richard Hughes’ story ‘The

Stranger’ in A Moment of Time – reviewed alongside Lolly Willowes in The Nation & Athenaeum. His

devil is, conversely, ‘a grotesque thing, with misshapen ears and a broad, flat nose’ who sits on coals

and is pained by touching the Bible. [Muriel Spark, The Ballad of Peckham Rye (London: Macmillan,

1960); Richard Hughes, A Moment of Time (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926) p.60] 795

Muir, 'Review of Lolly Willowes' p.782

250

and Satan is not, in fact, given a name. His identity is not tied down in this manner –

rather, he complements the uncertain and changing identity of Laura. While

presenting these fluid selfhoods in human form, Satan paradoxically also represents

the unalterable. He comments “[o]nce a wood, always a wood”,796

ignoring the

lopped trees, since he is impervious to change from his eternal perspective. Nature

may appear ‘in league’ with him, but he is insensitive to its flexibilities: an indication

of the limitations of his sympathies.

For, contrary to many interpretations, Satan does not represent a triumphant solution

to Laura’s troubles. As he says to Laura:

“[Y]ou are in my power. No servant of mine can feel remorse, or doubt, or

surprise. You may be quite easy, Laura: you will never escape me, for you can

never wish to.”797

His shifting identity is reflected in his imprecise use of words: ‘you can never wish to’

could be interpreted as either ‘you would never wish to’ or ‘you may never wish to’.

The former indicates that her situation will be too pleasant to wish to change; the

latter suggests that, no matter how unpleasant, she cannot escape. This interpretation

seems more probable; it is certainly more connotative with ‘power’ and ‘servant’.

The published novel ends with Satan’s ‘undesiring and unjudging gaze, his satisfied

but profoundly indifferent ownership.’798

The limits of Laura’s supposed freedom are

emphasised by having ‘ownership’ as the final word of the novel. Although he does

not desire or judge her, it is difficult to assert ‘indifferent’ as a positive quality, when

in conjunction with ownership. Had a male relative restricted her emotions in this

manner, without even affection, the critical consensus of Lolly Willowes would

796

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.230 797

Ibid. p.233 798

Ibid. p.247

251

doubtless steer sharply away from its current avowal of a feminist manifesto. It is

rather astonishing that Jane Marcus can quote the novel’s final line and immediately

add that Laura is ‘a free woman’; that Gerd Bjorhovde considers her an ‘autonomous

subject’, even while using the term ‘Master’, and that Barbara Brothers can surmise

that Laura is ‘vowing to serve her own desires and not those of a man’.799

Satan is the

ultimate power-hungry man, ‘the most arrogantly chauvinist of all power figures’, as

Eleanor Perényi puts it.800

Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe relates that the

devil sometimes appeared as a woman; this option was open to Warner, and she chose

not to take it.801

The maleness of Laura’s ultimate captor cannot be sidelined to make

a simpler reading of the novel.

Laura is not even free from the social mores of the middlebrow world she escapes,

since these so fixedly characterise the dynamics of Great Mop. Warner described

herself as having ‘always been interested in the supernatural in its social aspects’.802

The far-reaching effects of Laura’s social milieu are demonstrated in the middlebrow

translation of witchcraft in the novel. Instead of voodoo dolls, Laura makes voodoo

scones, ‘cut[ting] the dough into the likenesses of the village people’,803

and by

domesticating the occult, does not sever links with the domestic. In her humorous

799

Jane Marcus, ''A Wilderness of One's Own': Feminist Fantasy Novels of the Twenties: Rebecca

West and Sylvia Townsend Warner' in Susan Merrill Squier (ed.) Women Writers and the City: Essays

in Feminist Literary Criticism (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984) 134-160, p.157;

Gerd Bjørhovde, 'Transformation and Subversion as Narrative Strategies in Two Fantasy Novels of the

1920s' in Peter Bilton et al. (eds.) Essays in Honour of Kristian Smidt (Oslo, Norway: University of

Oslo, 1986) 213-224, pp.216f; Brothers, 'Flying the Nets at Forty: Lolly Willowes as Female

Bildungsroman' p.199 800

Perényi, 'The Good Witch of the West' p.30 801

Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology p.31. Brothers writes that

Satan’s ‘maleness is an attribute ascribed by the [faith] Warner attacks rather than of the character she

presents’, but it is difficult to agree with this, given Warner’s other liberties; Satan simply is male in

the novel; his maleness is an awkward fact that some critics of the novel wish wasn’t there. [Brothers,

'Flying the Nets at Forty: Lolly Willowes as Female Bildungsroman' p.209] 802

Warner, Warner, and Schmidt, 'Sylvia Townsend Warner in Conversation' p.36 803

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.142

252

Eve article, Warner describes the triumphs of witchcraft in a manner redolent of

middlebrow women’s magazines:

Why are some women so successful in all they do? They grow the largest sweet

peas, they have the neatest sandwiches, their complexions are so permanent, the

backs of their necks are so small; their children always have measles at school

and never at home, and everyone enjoys their dinner parties.804

A more domiciliary roll call of successes could scarcely be imagined. One newspaper

responded to Lolly Willowes on such a domestic level that ‘ever since I read Sylvia

Townsend Warner’s amazing book “Lolly Willowes” I’ve been bitten by the desire to

try my hand at cordials. The result has been loganberry vinegar[…]’, and proceeded

to give the recipe.805

Even the most uncanny aspects of witchcraft in Lolly Willowes

are tied to the domestic commonplaces of Laura’s previous existence, through the

imagery Warner uses. The music of the witches, for instance, is ‘something like

mosquitoes in a hot bedroom’.806

This particular image is one of annoyance and

stuffiness, rather than emancipation, and the claustrophobia of the hostile home

persists into this new sphere.

The scene in Lolly Willowes most reflective of middlebrow society is, in fact, the

Witches’ Sabbath. As well as exemplifying the novel’s theme of change and fluidity

(‘The etiquette of a Sabbath appeared to consist of one rule only: to do nothing for

long. Partners came and went, figures and conformations were in a constant flux’)807

Warner makes overt comparisons between this event and a social dance – wondering

‘whether at length Mrs. Leak would come, like a chaperone from the supper-room,

804

Warner, 'Modern Witches' p.331 805

‘Mirror Cookery Book’, The Daily Mirror (15/7/26), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/34 (Press

Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of Reading 806

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.194 807

Ibid. p.193

253

and say: “Well, my dear, I really must take you home”’.808

This imagined scenario

and dialogue are quintessentially and cloyingly part of the social apparatus she has

longed to escape, and reference to a ‘chaperone’ underlines the drawbacks of her

status as an unmarried woman. The unsuccessful Sabbath is the first indication that

the witch is not a wholly triumphant symbol. Laura cannot escape from the

restrictions of social awkwardness:

Their dance was short, she supposed she had not acquitted herself to her

partner’s satisfaction, for after a few turns he released her, and left her standing

by the hedge. Not a word had passed between them. Laura felt that she ought

to say something, but she could not think of a suitable opening. It was scarcely

possible to praise the floor.

A familiar discouragement began to settle upon her spirits. In spite of her hopes

she was not going to enjoy herself. Even as a witch, it seemed, she was doomed

to social failure, and her first Sabbath was not going to open livelier vistas than

were opened by her first ball.809

The kinetic activity of the ‘turns’ (reflecting her own initiated metamorphosis) swiftly

becomes the mundane stasis of ‘standing by the hedge’; Laura’s change of self is

equally abruptly halted, and tied to her previous hubris. Again, the word ‘familiar’

comes back to haunt her. Laura is disappointed not to escape the pitfalls of her

previous experiences with society, even (sardonically) lamenting the inadequacy of

grass as a dance floor, rather than revelling in the natural world. Significantly, there

is no indication in Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe that Sabbaths

(described by Murray as ‘joyous gaiety’)810

included dances with partners – instead

the ‘two principal forms of the dance were the ring-dance and the follow-my-leader

808

Ibid. pp.197f 809

Ibid. pp.190f 810

Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology p.97

254

dance’811

. Warner herself introduces the partner dance, to reinforce the limitations of

Laura’s quest for freedom.

‘She smiled at the thought of having the house all to herself’812

: Laura’s

independent space

The sole triumph of Laura’s recourse to the fantastic – which is not community or

personal autonomy – is her securement of spatial autonomy; it is ultimately this which

she believes has become ‘inviolate’ after her compact with the devil.813

Yet her

affiliation with her new home is not uncomplicated; her arrival in the countryside

does not immediately guarantee a new and healthy relationship with space. At first

the instinct for patterns, inculcated by the Willowes family and prefigured by the

decorative images in the shop/orchard, dominates the way in which Laura tries to

engage with Great Mop, primarily through maps.

When inspired to move to Great Mop, she buys a ‘small guide-book to the Chilterns’

and seeks a map that ‘must, she explained, be very detailed, and give as many names

and footpaths as possible.’814

Again, this is reflected in Radclyffe Hall’s ‘Miss

Ogilvy Loses Her Way’: ‘Miss Ogilvy had chosen this place quite at random, it was

marked on her map by scarcely more than a dot, but somehow she had liked the look

of that dot and had set forth alone to explore it.’815

But where Miss Ogilvy is drawn

to the ambiguity of a dot, Laura initially desires a thorough and precise organisation

of space, complete with fixed naming (so fluid in her own identity). Her faith in her

map and guide-book is absolute and unquestioning:

811

Ibid. p.132 812

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.166 813

Ibid. p.174 814

Ibid. p.86 815

Hall, 'Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself' pp.17f

255

“It does seem almost too good to be true. But it is. I’ve read it in a guide-book,

and seen it on a map.”816

Warner herself ‘liked maps […] and the picture-making technique of map-reading.’817

She thus identifies an interpretive gap between signifier and signified – between that

on the map and that in actuality – which Laura fails to do. When the promised ‘Inn’

fails to materialise, Warner cheerfully stayed at a farmhouse with a Mrs. May (who

provided inspiration for Laura’s landlady Mrs. Leak818

); Laura considers that the map

has ‘defrauded’ her by displaying a wood which had since been cut down. She

decides to abandon the map and ‘know no more of [Great Mop] than did its own

children.’819

It is a gesture of belonging, by refusing to let her independent space be

governed by a code which resists change and cannot keep track of the constant flux of

the countryside. As Lefebvre writes: ‘How many maps, in the descriptive or

geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code

and decode all its meanings and contents?’820

Laura had relied upon one inflexible

map to act as an arbiter of space, and comes to recognise that static representation and

multifaceted reality cannot be elided. She abandons this need for an ordered

arrangement, and discards the map and guidebook in a well:

About this time she did an odd thing. In her wanderings she had found a

disused well. It was sunk at the side of a green lane, and grass and bushes had

grown up around its low rim, almost to conceal it, the wooden frame was

broken and mouldered, ropes and pulleys had long ago been taken away, and the

water was sunk far down[.]821

816

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.95 817

Sylvia Townsend Warner, 'The Way By Which I Have Come (4)' The Countryman, 19/2 (1939)

472-486, p.476 818

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Sylvia Townsend Warner Archives (F(right)/66/4), Dorset Country

Museum 819

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.216; p.128 820

Lefebvre, The Production of Space p.85 821

Warner, Lolly Willowes pp.127f

256

Although this scene is usually read as the rejection of the masculine, in favour of

nature, the well is itself an example of the trammelling of nature for man’s purposes.

The inherent fluidity and freedom of water is kept contained and accessible. Since the

well is disused and overgrown, it also represents the retaliation of nature, but the

qualifying ‘almost’ (and that the well remains at all) shows the irreversibility of man’s

impact on the countryside. It is a quasi-metamorphosis between manmade and natural,

refusing a simple dichotomy between the two – as well as another instance of the

word ‘odd’ delineating Laura.

While she discards the map, Laura remains keen to domesticate the countryside. Her

relationship with the natural landscape, and her impulse for nature, should be

considered chiefly as an extension of her impulse for space, particularly for mediated

levels of space; a mantra later crystallised in Woolf’s famous 1929 essay as ‘a woman

must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’.822

She does not

opt, as Jane Marcus suggests in an essay of the name, for ‘a wilderness of one’s

own’823

– or at least not an absolute wilderness – but for the inhabited and defined

perimeters of a village, and even within this she insists upon further imposing of

boundaries, reading images of the home within nature. Rather than separating

domestic and natural space, Laura ‘fancied herself at home’ when lost in a field.824

She could be interpreted as delusionally believing herself to be at home, or imagining

what it would be like if the field were her home, or (given the power of imagination

822

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf considers past accounts of ‘a witch being ducked, of a woman

possessed by devils’ an indication of ‘lost novelist(s)’; for Woolf, as for Laura, witchcraft is an act of

creation. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2008) p.4, p.85. Incidentally, Marcus suggests that Warner’s 1959 lecture ‘Women as

Writers’ ‘revived interest in Woolf’s then forgotten text, A Room of One’s Own.’ [Jane Marcus, 'Sylvia

Townsend Warner (1893-1978)' in Bonnie Kine Scott (ed.) The Gender of Modernism: A Critical

Anthology (Bloomington; Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990) 531-538, p.535] 823

Marcus, ''A Wilderness of One's Own': Feminist Fantasy Novels of the Twenties: Rebecca West and

Sylvia Townsend Warner' passim 824

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.202

257

and projection in the novel) even forming a home in the field through a creative act of

fancifulness. Earlier in the novel:

Laura had spent the afternoon in a field, a field of unusual form, for it was

triangular. On two sides it was enclosed by woodland, and because of this it

was already darkening into a premature twilight, as though it were a room.825

Motifs of enclosure persist, domesticating the natural, but here Laura can determine

the image: it is ‘as though it were a room’, but it is more malleable than a room. The

similarity is not static, and the space can flux between room and field. Bachelard

suggests that, when contented, ‘an imaginary room rises up around our bodies’;826

for

him, images of home are synonymous with images of peace. For Laura, it is the

ability to control these domestic tropes independently which represents spatial

triumph.

Laura’s privileged moments of spatial control are compromises between room and

wilderness. They take place on peripheries, both inside and outside. Laura laments

the lot of most women:

Doing, doing, doing, till mere habit scolds at them like a housewife, and rouses

them up – when they might sit in their doorways and think – to be doing still!827

Similarly, when she first inhabits her room, she leans out of the window:

For a long time she continued to lean out of the window, forgetting where she

was and how she had come there, so unearthly was her contentment.828

825

Ibid. p.153 826

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space p.137 827

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.236 828

Ibid. p.110

258

In both cases, it is the occupation of a peripheral, liminal place – the doorway, the

open window – which most delights Laura, and which constitutes her concept of

utopia. These spaces are uncircumscribed, offering both choice and a refusal to be

pinned down to a single model or epithet, echoing the flexibility of selfhood Laura

desires. In her view, once the former is secured, the latter is also achieved.

The image of the garden recurs in domestic fantastic novels, offering a space ideally

situated between the (supposed) fixity of the home and the infinitude of nature; the

garden is, indeed, the domestication of limitlessness. Although Briganti and Mezei

suggest that ‘modernity, the metropolis and the home, whether bucolic or urban,

replaced the pastoral idyll as a site for the emerging feminine self’,829

middlebrow

fantastic novelists create their own version of the pastoral in these controlled, in-

between spaces. When Clarissa first appears in The Love-Child, ‘walks in the garden

were the times when Clarissa was most real.’830

The idea of reality existing as a non-

binary quantity (that is, that someone may exist between ‘real’ and ‘not-real’) re-

asserts the garden as a liminal space. For Agatha, the garden (echoing the Garden of

Eden) is a site of creation and of sustained vitality; Olivier literalises the idea she

writes elsewhere that ‘Gardening is Creation. It is taking part in the activity of the

Creator of the world[.]’831

(Leonora Eyles even considers the garden itself as a ‘child

and friend’.832

) While Agatha wishes to keep Clarissa inside the house, it is in the

garden where she appears for both the first and last times; Lady Into Fox similarly

ends in the garden (albeit tragically). Anna Koenen argues that fantasy is an escape

‘to fantastic landscapes that are wide open, and that offer freedom and promise

829

Briganti and Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E.H. Young p.4 830

Olivier, The Love-Child p.24 831

Olivier, Country Moods and Tenses: A Non-Grammarian's Chapbook p.101 832

Eyles, Unmarried But Happy p.78

259

wholeness’,833

but for the middlebrow fantastic it is contained spaces which offer this

promise, and limitless spaces are intentionally abbreviated (that is, domesticated) by

the heroines who host the fantastic, into an amalgam of room and not-room.

Ultimately, although it is seemingly nature with which Laura makes her first pact,834

an updated version of the pastoral is not sufficient for Laura and her quest for spatial

autonomy. If it were, she would not have needed to take recourse to a pact with

Satan. Warner herself had no romantic illusions about the countryside, being later

party to Valentine Ackland’s exposure of the inadequacies and insanitary nature of

working-class rural life, published in 1936 as County Conditions. Views of the

countryside tended to two extremes in the early twentieth century. Mary Jacobs

writes that it represented both conservatism, ‘imbued with patriotism, spirituality and

authenticity’,835

and radicalism; these elements combine in the atavism which Warner

exploits for both its pre-modern and its subversive qualities. Similarly, Gan notes the

paradoxical identities of the countryside, as both ‘whimsical place of escape, a

nostalgic refuge’, and a site of ‘harsh county realities’, either acknowledged or

ignored.836

This paradox was recognised by some in the 1920s. Barrington Gates

writes in The Nation & the Athenaeum, regarding incompatible representations of the

countryside in contemporary fiction, that it was ‘irritating to be tossed about so

furiously between Arcadia and the dunghill’. His article discusses his inclination to

833

Koenen (1999) p.270 834

It is made ‘in the middle of a field’ and ‘the woods seemed to say, “No! We will not let you go.”’

L.P. Hartley interpreted her pledge as a sexualised act, describing it as ‘a communion with nature so

ecstatic as to be hardly decent’. Although perhaps a fanciful view, elsewhere Warner records a view of

the countryside as ‘sensuous and heathen and wicked’; nature is not an amoral quantity. [Warner, Lolly

Willowes p.165; Hartley, 'New Fiction' p.165; Warner and Harman, The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend

Warner p.40] 835

Mary Jacobs, 'Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Politics of the English Pastoral 1925-1934' in Gill

Davies, David Malcolm, and John Simons (eds.) Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner, English

Novelist 1893-1978 (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006) 61-82, pp.62f 836

Gan, Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing p.77

260

write a book about the countryside, until reading Lolly Willowes he discovers himself

guilty of ‘Titusitis’ – that is, an inappropriate and uninformed love of the

countryside.837

His reference is to Warner’s nephew Titus, now a grown man and a visitor to Great

Mop. The Willowes-possessive makes another appearance (without apostrophe,

enveloping the object into its identity) when Titus loves Great Mop ‘with all the deep

Willowes love for country sights and smells’, and ‘would stop and illustrate the

landscape with possessive gestures’.838

As is much-quoted, he ‘loved the countryside

as though it were a body’839

– a somatic comparison of which Laura is not innocent,

since from her perspective ‘the hills folded themselves round her like the fingers of a

hand.’840

In her image, of course, nature is the dominant protector, which presumably

is not the intended implication in Titus’ love of the countryside.

But it is not simply Titus’ sexualisation of the countryside which makes his arrival

unwelcome to Laura. Brothers identifies his ‘threatened transformation of the

villagers and their environs into quaintness.’841

In so doing, Titus reinstates a

Willowes code which places Great Mop in relation to the conceptions of London and

the Willowes’ home, understood solely by its difference from those locations. He is

like the tourists who visit the picturesque cottage which is at the opening of Warner’s

long poem Opus 7, which has ‘all things such as glad / the hearts of those who dwell

837

Barrington Gates, ‘On Great Mop and Other Places’, Nation & the Athenaeum (14/9/26), Chatto &

Windus Archive CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of Reading 838

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.160; p.214 839

Ibid. p.160 840

Ibid. p.127 841

Brothers, 'Flying the Nets at Forty: Lolly Willowes as Female Bildungsroman' p.206

261

in town but would / spend weekends in the country’.842

His tourist gaze brings back

the attitudes and patterns of the restrictive house she has left and, crucially, challenges

her identity as, under Titus’ perspective, ‘Great Mop would be a place, a pastoral

landscape where an aunt walked out with her nephew.’843

While opposing a

traditional reading of the landscape, Laura is more significantly combating the aunt

classification which this pastoral context would bestow upon her, as she originally

came ‘to be in the country, and to escape being an aunt’.844

In her gradual antagonism

towards Titus, Laura fears the strictures of reductive epithets rather than Titus’ power

(for it must be remembered that he intends to be sympathetic).

In ridding herself of her status as aunt, Laura can concentrate on her relationship with

space. Although she does not fall in love with the house itself (in the way, for

instance, whimsically suggested by David Garnett in a letter to Warner845

), Laura

certainly values the opportunity to inhabit what she thinks of as ‘her new domain’,846

a word used several times in the novel. Lefebvre notes that ‘terms of everyday

discourse’ used to denote sections of space, such as room, corner, and marketplace,

‘serve to distinguish, but not to isolate, particular spaces, and in general to describe a

social space. They correspond to a specific use of that space, and hence to a spatial

practice that they express and constitute.’ 847

The term ‘domain’ is not, then, an

insignificant choice. It isn’t clear who produces or authorises the term – Laura, or the

842

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Opus 7 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931) p.1 843

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.162 844

Ibid. p.231 845

‘Such excitements, my dear, have been happening to me. It’s not a person, but a – no, not an animal

– but a house that I have fallen in love with this time. And I feel as I did when I was twenty, that it was

irretrievable, irrevocable – that if I cannot live in that house I shall / never live in any other – that if I

am lucky I shall never be unfaithful even in thought to its bedrooms, though all the hotels in Europe

shamelessly solicit me.’ [Warner, Garnett, and Garnett, Sylvia and David: The Townsend

Warner/Garnett Letters pp.8f] 846

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.108 847

Lefebvre, The Production of Space p.16

262

narrator – but it gives Laura control over the space, and overlaps with the mythic

semantics of the fantastic and fairy-tale. This control is exemplified in the

practicalities and arrangements of her new house:

The fireplace had caught Laura’s fancy when she first looked at the rooms. She

had stipulated with Mrs. Leak that, should she so wish, she might cook on it.848

Although she has a landlady – so even this independent space is not wholly

independent; freedoms are always curtailed in the novel – Laura’s wishes are

paramount in this space. Modal verbs and contingencies are under Laura’s

jurisdiction; she has power over a space and the activities therein, and thus greater

power over her own life, without that rigidity of routine certainties which

circumscribes another character inspired by primitivism, Denham in Rose Macaulay’s

Crewe Train.849

Where Denham’s lifestyle is imposed upon her by a female relative,

Laura realises that the Willowes family ‘could not drive her out, or enslave her spirit

any more, nor shake her possession of the place she had chosen.’850

This latter

certainty comes not simply from moving to the countryside, but by becoming a witch

– it is only this, Laura believes, which will enable her to maintain sanctuary in her

rented house. By recourse to the fantastic, Laura has changed the rules, as it were.

Ordinary familial interactions and invasions are no longer possible, for Laura has

played with the normative structures of reality and expected actions.

848

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.108 849

Crewe Train concludes with Denham’s mother-in-law advising that she have ‘some kind of scheme

mapped out for the day’, appropriating the word ‘map’ from her – for Denham is fascinated by maps –

and using it against her. [Macaulay, Crewe Train p.255] 850

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.174

263

Gaining control over this space is also an ongoing act of creation. Lefebvre describes

space as ‘a product to be used, […but] also a means of production’.851

Laura uses the

dynamics of her new home to contribute towards her transformation; this space not

only provides the context for her creative transformation, but permits it. Severed

from the household which unhealthily restricted her, she develops an altered

personality and forms new abilities. In the first few pages it is stated:

Even in 1902 there were some forward spirits who wondered why that Miss

Willowes, who was quite well off, and not likely to marry, did not make a home

for herself and take up something artistic or emancipated.852

The irony is that Laura does not take up anything artistic, in the traditional

understanding of the word. Her escape has been prophesied since the turn of the

century – but this version of escape plays in too neatly with society’s view of

spinsters outside the home. It is, indeed, the sort of environment where visiting

relatives are expected, as an outpost of the family home, with the same restrictions

and expectations. Laura chooses a different route, and a fantastic version of the

artistic.

While there is a sense that Laura becomes the created object of Satan, this creative

relationship is symbiotic. When Laura says that women ‘have more need of you’,853

it

is their need which animates Satan, and is itself a creative force. By presenting their

need, they give him purpose. He is desired and incorporated into a familial spectrum

– if not as the eligible bachelor, as he is often figured in Murray’s accounts, then as

the patriarch who permits action. Yet Laura’s change is a self-creation too. It follows

851

Lefebvre, The Production of Space p.85, quoted by Nesbitt, 'Footsteps of Red Ink: Body and

Landscape in Lolly Willowes' p.452 852

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.6 853

Ibid. p.234

264

a series of choices she makes independently, and it is her choice to awaken the latent

‘witchy’ aspects of her spinsterhood. Bruce Knoll writes that Laura ‘learns how to let

nature claim her – not a totally passive act, for by opening herself up to nature, whose

influence reached her even in London, she allowed herself to be transformed’.854

Similarly, opening oneself up to a psychological metamorphosis brings a complicity

which is a form of self-creation. Bjorhovde notes that, as the novel progresses,

Lolly Willowes has moved from an omniscient, fairly objective point of view to

a subjective one, with an ending partly in direct speech, partly inside Laura’s

consciousness. Gone is the ironical viewpoint of a narrator at a distance;

instead Laura herself is the controlling consciousness of the text.855

The changing dynamic of narrator and character, skewed as narrative objectivity is

focalised into subjectivity, is seen also in the relationship between creator and created;

roles which coincide and then merge. While mental projection in The Love-Child

destabilises Todorov’s idea of fantasies of the self and those of the other, Lolly

Willowes removes the distinction completely, performing both at once. Kate

Macdonald writes that witches ‘have a peculiar position in the panoply of fantastical

creatures, since they are essentially humans trying to have commerce with the

supernatural, rather than being supernatural themselves.’856

This distinction is helpful

to a point, but Laura is not a passive instrument of the fantastic (in the way that Silvia

Tebrick initially is). Instead, although not inherently a fantastic being, she organises

and inaugurates the fantastic. Laura simultaneously causes change and experiences

change in a relationship which is never finalised because the creation never reaches

completion, just as the narrative never evolves entirely into the first person, but rests

854

Knoll, '"An Existence Doled Out": Passive Resistance as a Dead End in Sylvia Townsend Warner's

Lolly Willowes' p.362 855

Bjørhovde, 'Transformation and Subversion as Narrative Strategies in Two Fantasy Novels of the

1920s' p.218 856

Macdonald, 'Witchcraft and Non-conformity in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes (1926)

and John Buchan's Witch Wood (1927)' p.224

265

at the halfway point of indirect discourse. This telescoping of perspective, from the

broad to the narrow, does not give the novel a claustrophobic atmosphere, but rather

demonstrates the positive counterpart of claustrophobia, where enclosure and

boundaries are chosen and welcomed.

This satisfactory organisation of space is illustrated when Laura reflects upon the

‘rings of fortification’ protecting her newly-won independent space:

She felt herself inhabiting the empty house. Through the unrevealing square of

the window her mind looked at the view. About the empty house was the

village, and about the village the hills, neighbourly under their covering of

night. Room, house, village, hills encircled her like the rings of a fortification.

This was her domain, and it was to keep this inviolate that she had made her

compact with the Devil.857

Various layers of space have become firmly controlled, and the anxious interaction

between self and environment has reached a moment of stillness and balance. Laura

is at the centre of the new pattern which has been established. The passage reflects an

earlier depiction of a domestic structure, in the Willowes’ home:

The tables and chairs and cabinets stood in the same relation to each other as

before; the pictures hung in the same order though on new walls; and the Dorset

hills were still to be seen from the windows, though now from windows facing

south instead of from windows facing north.858

Rather than items of furniture sat in implacable bonds, Laura’s ‘domain’ extends

beyond the house to the anthropomorphised (‘neighbourly’) hills and the environment

around her.

857

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.174 858

Ibid. p.11

266

Yet even this illustration of spatial harmony is not permitted to be an unadulterated

triumph. It appears before the unsuccessful Sabbath and before Titus invades the

village – even before she has actually met Satan. It is an image of settlement which is

immediately unsettled in the narrative, and even the passage itself is, on closer

examination, unsettling. While the hills could be seen through the Willoweses’

windows, here Laura’s ‘mind looked at the view’; empirical evidence is replaced by

the psychical and uncertain. Similarly, her occupation of space is unstably

overdetermined in the idea that she ‘felt herself inhabiting the empty house’ (it is

apparently empty, despite her presence). The physical boundaries of this site are

elided with her mental horizons. The fixed, widening stronghold in which Laura has

fought to centre herself brings with it a less fixed mental state.

The irony central to Lolly Willowes, of course, is that geographical invulnerability is

accompanied with the sacrifice of all that is not physical – by selling her soul to

Satan. Even this spatial security is left uncertain, and the end of the novel has been

read as implying Laura’s death – indeed, Warner’s publisher Charles Prentice

requested an altered, extended ending to the novel, suggesting that what she had

written was ‘too strong an intimation of death’.859

The original version ended a page

after this excerpt, with the following paragraph:

She got up in her turn, and began to shake the dust off her skirt. Then she

prodded a hole for the bag which held the pears, and buried it tidily, smoothing

the earth over the hole. This took a little time to do, and when she looked round

for Satan, to say Goodbye, he was out of sight.860

859

Harman, Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography p.62 860

Sylvia Townsend Warner, 'The Original Ending of Lolly Willowes' The Journal of the Sylvia

Townsend Warner Society, 2001 (2001) 32-34, p.34. The published novel’s equivalent paragraph is

almost identical, but substitutes ‘apples’ for ‘pears’, continuing the theme of apples which casts Laura

as Adam or Eve.

267

Although Warner made the requested alterations, and the published version includes

more about Laura’s future as a witch, it also removes any further direct speech from

Satan, and the exclamation ‘Dead!’ is the final line of dialogue he is given in the

published novel.861

Other indications of Laura’s death – from her asking ‘“Is it

time?”’ to ‘the sun had gone down, sliding abruptly behind the hills’862

– suggest the

potential for a cyclicality to the novel, which opens with Mr. Willowes’ death.

The eternal dependence Laura has chosen, to the dominating, masculine figure of

Satan, reveals an underlying metamorphosis in Lolly Willowes which is not connected

to witchcraft: the metamorphosis of Laura’s ambitions. These morph from a longing

for complete escape to an acceptance of partial escape. She claims to choose

witchcraft ‘to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others’,863

but this is only true in a limited sense. As Updike writes, ‘Freedom, in daily things, is

what Lolly Willowes likes about her condition.’864

She negotiates with her ambitions,

and settles upon the primacy of the everyday, and the spaces of everyday use.

Although more than one critic has called Lolly Willowes a fable or parable, and two

contemporary reviewers conclude that Laura will live ‘happily ever after’,865

861

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.243. In the original version, his final speech is: “In a few minutes, Laura,

you will leave this hill-top and get into the bus. You will then begin another life. The bus will be hot,

crowded, and dusty. In fact it will be rather like hell. When you reach Barleighs you will get out of the

bus and begin another life of walking home through the fields. It will be cool, sweet-smelling, and

peaceful. You will listen to the trees and look up without disquiet at the stars. Your thoughts will be

slow and loving and it will be rather like heaven.” Although this has obvious allusions to the afterlife,

offering a prosaic and domesticated version of Purgatory, it also softens the impact of Satan’s

exclamation of ‘Death’. [Warner, 'The Original Ending of Lolly Willowes' p.33] 862

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.243; p.246 863

Ibid. p.239 864

John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (London: Penguin, 1983) p.306 865

‘Fable’ in Penelope Fitzgerald, 'Keeping Warm' London Review of Books, (1982) 22-23, p.22,

Sylvia Lynd, 'Review of Lolly Willowes' Time and Tide, 19/03/26 (1926) 271-272, p.271, and Robert L.

Caserio, The Novel in England, 1900-1950 (New York: Twayne, 1999) p.226; ‘Parable’ in Gill Davies,

'The Corners That Held Her: The Importance of Place in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Writing' in Gill

Davies, David Malcolm, and John Simons (eds.) Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner, English

268

Warner’s novel is not constructed on the lines of a fairy-tale or a simple narrative with

a clear moral or message, as would be expected from fable and parable. Warner is

much less reductive than those who posit Lolly Willowes as a simple feminist

manifesto would allow. Those who do see only the triumph of the emancipated

woman to some extent quietly agree with the reading offered by one of Lolly

Willowes’ contemporary reviewers:

And we may be tempted to wonder whether Miss Warner could not have

developed what seems, after all, to be her main theme in a manner less fantastic,

making less demand upon the reader’s credulity (or shall we say imaginative

sympathy?), with gain rather than loss to the value of her ultimate

achievements. For at the bottom the tale of Laura Willowes is the tale of an old

maid’s revolt against uselessness, dependence, and conventional

respectability.866

Lolly Willowes is decidedly not a simple tale of freedom regained, and the fantastic is

not incidental. Laura’s motivations are indeed those this reviewer identifies, but by

using a fantastic framework (however late it arrives in the narrative) Warner can say

more about the ultimate complexity of these struggles, and the absence of any neat

conclusions. As Bjørhovde notes, ‘the subversiveness of Lolly Willowes chiefly rests

on the openness of its ending and its refusal to provide the reader with neatly wrapped

packages of definitions, whether they concern womanhood or sexuality, selfhood or

reality.’867

To this list could be added concepts of space and home, which Warner

plays with throughout, yet refuses to treat as a binary entity between absolute

dependence and absolute independence.

Novelist 1893-1978 (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006) 1-10, p.5 and

Janet Montefiore, Arguments of Heart and Mind: Selected Essays 1977-2000 (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 2002) p.156; ‘Happy ever after’ in Daily News (23/2/26) and Nation & the

Athenaeum (14/9/26) Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of

Reading 866

‘The Making of a Witch’, Birmingham Post (29/1/26), Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/34 (Press

Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of Reading 867

Bjørhovde, 'Transformation and Subversion as Narrative Strategies in Two Fantasy Novels of the

1920s' p.217

269

In the Book Society Newsletter Sylvia Lynd writes that Lolly Willowes ‘contrived to

express the dissatisfaction which we all feel more or less intensely, and at one time or

another, with the ordered conventional life of civilisation.’868

Although Warner’s

target may be narrower than the whole sphere of conventionality, by writing a novel

about witchcraft, she fits into a longer narrative about women’s responses to

anxieties: Diana Purkiss traces the history of ‘many people, especially women, who

had invented, reinvented and retold stories of witches which affirmed and denied their

own problematic identities, allowing them to express and manage desires, fears, and

anxieties.’869

This is precisely what Warner does – but, as with many articulations of

‘desires, fears, and anxieties’, does not offer a flawless solution. Laura’s hubris is the

foreshortening of her metamorphoses, and her incomplete acts of self-creation.

Warner consistently rebuts absolutes, whether connected to gender and patriarchy,

nature as a wilderness, or houses as entirely repressive or entirely freeing, and Laura’s

own transformation into a witch is continually tethered to her previous existence as ‘a

thing out of common speech […] Spinster’.870

868

Sylvia Lynd, 'The Art of Fiction' Book Society News, November (1931b) 11-12, p.11 869

Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations p.2 870

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.61

270

Conclusion

“Is this really a part of the house, or are we dreaming?”871

: Fantastic

Novels as Alternative Spaces

The domestic shift central to Lolly Willowes is also an exemplar for a fundamental

shift throughout middlebrow fantastic fiction. That is, there is invariably some variety

of domestic upheaval in these novels, whether this takes place before or during the

narrative. When it takes place before the opening of the novel in question, it is

usually a restructuring of statuses in the home: The Love-Child, Lolly Willowes, and

David Lindsay’s The Haunted Woman all open with death, for example, which

necessarily causes a reorganisation of the home and the roles within it. Whether or

not the novel opens with a scene of domestic unsettlement, the arrival of the fantastic

always requires the rearrangement of, hiding within, or protection of the house.

Whatever else is concomitant with the fantastic, the arrangement of space and the

ordinary procedures of the home cannot remain settled or unaffected.

In some instances, this upheaval is performed as dramatically and overtly on a spatial

level as it is in Lolly Willowes, with its negotiation of furniture developing into a quest

for autonomous space and removal to the countryside. The same elaborate navigation

of space is central to The Haunted Woman, where space literally shifts, and

[e]very morning, for a week on end, a flight of stairs used to appear to him in

that room, leading up out of a blank wall. He avers that he not only saw them,

but used to go up them, but he hasn’t the vaguest recollection of what took place

on top.872

871

Lindsay, The Haunted Woman p.84 872

Ibid. p.11

271

Lindsay’s novel has often been read in partnership with his more famous Fantasy

novel A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) as a treatise on metaphysics and the nature of

reality,873

but its central conceit has a more general application away from this field.

The space to which the hero and heroine go, and remember nothing from once they

have returned, is emblematic of the wider search for space in the domestic fantastic –

which, in turn, echoes the concerns about placement which (as discussed) dominate

discussions about the middlebrow and their cultural and societal marks of distinction.

But, more than this, it is a paradigm for the uneasiness and segregation of the spaces

where the fantastic takes place, and their apparent normality. When Isbel observes

the staircase which leads to the chimerical rooms for the first time, ‘[i]t did not strike

her that there was anything odd about these stairs; they were quite prosaic and real’.874

As she ascends them, they ‘were too solid and tangible to conjure up the very faintest

suspicion of anything supernatural.’875

The four adjectives ‘prosaic’, ‘real’, ‘solid’,

and ‘tangible’ are almost tautologous in their overdetermination of that which would

usually be taken for granted in the home; ‘real’, particularly, is a description which

can only draw attention to the possibility of unreality. Yet Lindsay is keen to make

clear that the staircase is visually an ordinary part of the house’s architecture (echoing

the decidedly normal homes of Agatha Bodenham, the Tebricks, and others) while the

rooms are equally emphatically separate from it. While their separation is

fantastically implemented, the spaces of fantastic novels are often more prosaically set

apart – whether by being the homes of lonely spinsters, or in the countryside, or by

other means.

873

For example, Colin Wilson suggests it is ‘a novel about the contrast between the reality that mystics

and great artists glimpse, and the messy, muddy, confused world most of us live in’. [Colin Wilson,

'Lindsay as Novelist and Mystic' in J.B. Pick, Colin Wilson, and E.H. Visiak (eds.) The Strange Genius

of David Lindsay (London: John Baker, 1970) 35-91, pp.66f] 874

Lindsay, The Haunted Woman p.46 875

Ibid. p.47

272

Few novels have a space as clearly liminal as Lindsay’s supernatural rooms, but even

without this aspect, the fixation upon a staircase (as one of Lindsay’s admirers,

Bernard Sellin, notes, ‘the staircase has long been one of the principal features of the

fantasy world’876

) would introduce a form of liminal space, ideal as a place both set

apart and in-between. These spaces, and the manipulation of settled areas of (or near)

the home, are seen throughout fantastic narratives.

As has been seen, Mr. Tebrick shuts off rooms in Lady Into Fox, and Agatha and

Clarissa initially travel to the domestic hinterland of a hotel; a quintessential example

of the meeting of home and not-home, or homely and unhomely. The metamorphoses

in Flower Phantoms and Green Thoughts take place in greenhouses, while Clarissa’s

appearance and Silvia Tebrick’s metamorphosis occur in gardens. In other fantastic

novels which this thesis has not had space to consider in depth, the moment of

supernatural intrusion also takes place in similarly in-between spaces: time-travel in

Bernadette Murphy’s An Unexpected Guest (1934) is accompanied by fantastic travel,

as Olivia is transferred from her carefully arranged living room, not to the ‘old house

at the top of the hill’ where the rest of the novel takes place, but rather to ‘the road

that led to it, twisting and turning in the sunlight’.877

A path leading to a house is also

the scene of the overlap of timescapes in Frank Baker’s Before I Go Hence (1945),878

while Ronald Fraser’s The Flying Draper (1924) first flies from the edge of a cliff

(and longs to land ‘in the shadows at the wood’s edge’879

). ‘Simultaneous time… the

876

Bernard Sellin, The Life and Works of David Lindsay, trans. Kenneth Gunnell (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1981) p.199 877

Murphy, An Unexpected Guest p.50. 878

‘The gate opened. The first man was coming up the garden-path’. [Frank Baker, Before I Go

Hence: Fantasia on a Novel (London: Andrew Dakers, 1945) p.5] 879

Fraser, The Flying Draper p.51

273

past co-existing with the present and the future’880

is observed on another stairway in

Rachel Ferguson’s A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936), and the fantastic in Helen

Beauclerk’s The Green Lacquer Pavilion (1926) takes place, as the title suggests, in a

pavilion. In all these instances, however significant a role the home plays in the

preparation for, and development of, the fantastic, the actual moment of change takes

place outside of the home (or, as with the stairway, in a liminal space within the

home). Peripheries are privileged places.

These alternative spaces often mimic or approach the home, or are domesticated

without being enclosed; they are not separate from the conception of the home, or

forming antagonisms to it, but they do resist the sense of completion and wholeness –

what Bachelard terms its ‘powers of integration’881

– which are inevitable, if false,

connotations of domestic space. The idealised home was recognised as false, and

undermined by the myriad societal factors discussed in this thesis (from Freudianism

to sexuality, servants to spinsterhood), but these novels map that undermining into a

spatial unsettling of the home as unified centre. It is changed neither from within or

without, but from the alternative space which is both inside and outside the sphere of

the domestic – on the peripheries, or in imitative spaces.

As discussed in the first chapter of this thesis, middlebrow readers threatened the

taxonomic processes required by highbrow critics by forming a broad and effectively

anonymous ‘alternative community’ with no fixed location. This was exemplified by

the Book Society, and by representative texts like the Provincial Lady novels which

anticipated a united identification across its readership (‘this communality’, as

880

Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square p.8 881

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space p.6

274

Humble notes, is ‘a key part of the way in which the women’s middlebrow novel

conceives of its readers’)882

but permitted this readership to remain dispersed and

private. In the same way, fantastic novels seek and provide an alternative space. This

is demonstrated in the greenhouses, pathways, gardens, and boundaries which play

significant roles in domestic fantastic novels, but is true of the subgenre itself more

broadly; that, in following the rules which set the fantastic apart from the realistic,

these narratives inhabit their own separate and exclusive space in a schema of

narratives. However many links and similarities they have with traditional domestic

fiction, including each author’s own output in this line, novels which incorporate the

supernatural and strange provide the reader with a separate sphere, and thus (like the

rooms in The Haunted Woman) a separate exegetical space for engagement and

response.

Why the fantastic?

Having established that an alternative generic space is created by these novels, there

remains the question of the motivations for the author choosing this space, and the

reader entering it. Manifestations of the fantastic have, throughout this thesis, been

associated with various societal factors, but it is worth taking a step back from these

interconnections and searching for a more general incentive or impulse for the

fantastic. The motivations for reading suggested by the author for the implied reader

may not, of course, be those experienced by each individual reader, or even the

aggregate reader, and it is always worth bearing in mind that identifying a single

motivation is necessarily a simplification. Theorists and critics who have done so for

the fantastic, or even for a substrata of the fantastic, ignore the complexity of the

882

Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s p.46

275

subgenre and the multiplicity of potential responses. Particularly widespread is the

claim that engaging with the fantastic is simply an act of escapism.

The label of escapism was often applied to the middlebrow as a whole during the

interwar period, whether this was an accusation levelled or a commendation reclaimed

and praised. Q. D. Leavis’ wrote that all non-realist fiction was escapist, seeming to

incorporate almost all novels into this category and certainly all romance, adventure,

and other examples of hyperbolic fiction, adding that ‘a habit of fantasying will lead

to maladjustment in actual life’.883

Conversely, W. Somerset Maugham defensively

suggested, in an address to the National Book League in 1951, that ‘all literature is

escapist. In fact that is its charm.’884

His claim is too reductive to be of much

practical help, since it reduces the idea of ‘escapism’ to that of ‘fiction’, but it does

introduce the recognition that ‘escapism’ is not the preserve of the middlebrow, nor

does it necessarily connote inferior writing.885

The implication often intended by the word ‘escapism’ is that the book in question is

inferior, and essentially an escape from thought or effort on the part of the reader; the

Provincial Lady tacitly agrees with this intimation. She is told by an acquaintance

‘J.L.’ that ‘the Greeks provide him with escapist literature. Plato.’ Her unspoken

response is that she ‘[s]hould not at all wish him to know The Fairchild Family

883

Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public pp.53f. Other writers acknowledge a greater disparity

within non-realistic novels, particularly between ‘fantasying’ and the fantastic; C. S. Lewis even

suggests that these facets are actually antagonistic, and the ‘unliterary [who] will accept stories which

we judge to be grossly improbable’ – ‘monstrous psychology and preposterous coincidence’ – ‘will not

accept admitted impossibilities and preternaturals.’ [Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism p.49; p.55] 884

W. Somerset Maugham, The Writer's Point of View (London: Cambridge University Press, 1951)

pp.9f, cited in Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s p.23 885

In Lewis’ discussion of escapism, for example, he includes works by Shakespeare, Chaucer, Sidney,

Spenser, and Coleridge, concluding that ‘[e]scape, then, is common to many good and bad kinds of

reading.’ [Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism pp.68f]

276

performs the same service for me’.886

The Fairchild Family, a series of three novels

written by Mary Martha Sherwood and published between 1818 and 1847, is a curious

choice for the Provincial Lady. Although it is another example of the middlebrow

reader’s love of ‘old and well-tried favourites’,887

these children’s books are famously

didactic; essentially evangelical Christian tracts. The Provincial Lady appears to feel

ashamed of favouring these novels888

– or at least anticipates being looked down upon

by ‘J.L.’ – but they could hardly be considered frivolous, or the variety of lightweight,

unlikely romances despised by Leavis and characterised euphemistically by a lower-

middle-class reader in Macaulay’s Keeping Up Appearances as ‘something out of the

way’ (in opposition to ‘one of those realistic, everyday books’).889

Elsewhere in the

Provincial Lady books, the heroine has similarly unusual (to 21st-century audiences)

feelings of reading shame – choosing Our Mutual Friend for an air raid shelter

(‘Shakespeare much more impressive but cannot rise to it’)890

and, as mentioned in

my first chapter, opting for Dickens, Charlotte M. Yonge, and Charlotte Brontë over

Keats and Austen, whom she ‘cannot compass’.891

It is clear the escapism is a

subjective concept, and individual novels cannot easily be labelled objective examples

of escapist literature.

886

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in Wartime' p.412 887

Gordon, 'Holiday Reading' p.11 888

The thought which immediately follows is ‘remember with shame that E.M. Forster, in admirable

wireless talk, has told us not to be ashamed of our taste in reading.’ [Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in

Wartime' p.412]. There is a curious layering of shame here; shame of her reading choices, and (in

turn) shame about that shame. It is, for this quintessential middlebrow reader, an apparently

inescapable trap – but by writing about it in this manner, Delafield anticipates collusion from her

audience. 889

Macaulay, Keeping Up Appearances p.46. The book in question is by Edgar Wallace, so the reader

was doubtless satisfied. Incidentally, when asked to contribute to series called “If I Could Live My

Life Again”, in the Daily Mail, Macaulay ‘said she would learn to write with both hands

simultaneously, so that she could be as prolific as pulp writer Edgar Wallace.’ Although doubtless

speaking flippantly, there is a certain respect for the practicalities of writing which is often present for

the middlebrow author. [Patrick Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006) p.158] 890

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in Wartime' p.418 891

Delafield, 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' p.86

277

Yet the subgenre of the fantastic, as a whole, has been seen as offering a more

obvious schema of escapism. Principally this is because the fantastic is believed to

offer wish-fulfilment (the novel acting in the way Freudianism argued dreams work)

and thereby effectively a heightening of pleasure or gratification in reading. Eric

Rabkin, for instance, suggests that the fantastic should be categorised alongside

pornography, westerns, adventure stories, and detective novels as ‘much-needed

psychological escape’,892

although his conflation of the various pleasures intended by

these discourses is rather simplistic. The pleasure of reading a detective novel is, one

presumes, somewhat different from that of ‘reading’ pornography. But it is true that

middlebrow readers (unlike their highbrow counterparts) happily admitted ‘reading

just for the pleasure of the thing’,893

as one reviewer writes of Lady Into Fox.

Reading was recognised by the middlebrow public, as Humble notes, as ‘a life-

enhancing, joyous experience’;894

Hilary Radner even suggests that the ‘division of

narratives into popular culture and literature corresponds to two distinct, rhetorically

inscribed regimes of pleasure’, the former being ‘hysteric’ (pleasure in the act of

reading itself) and the latter ‘obsessional’ (pleasure from the intellectual text, relating

to the result of reading, rather than the act).895

Although this division is perhaps too

restrictive, it certainly appears to be true that middlebrow readers rarely felt guilt at

the broader concept of enjoyment in literature.

To look at the other end of the spectrum from wish-fulfilment, another often-cited

basis for the label of escapism is the fear caused by fantastic literature (and thus a fear

which can be neatly compartmentalised). Fear and pleasure are not, of course,

892

Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature p.42 893

McDowall, 'A Candid Fantasy' p.121 894

Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s p.9 895

Radner, 'Extra-Curricular Activities: Women Writers and the Readerly Text' p.253

278

mutually exclusive. A chill down the spine was the hallmark of Gothic fiction, and

even in 1917, when war was bringing fear and pain to more ‘ordinary’ families than it

had for generations, Dorothy Scarborough noted that ‘humanity finds fear one of the

most pleasurable of emotions and truly enjoys vicarious horrors’.896

The operative

word here is ‘vicarious’. In a period where fear was no longer vicarious but

immediate, to distance it into a novel can be seen as an art of catharsis.

Looked at more closely, the fantastic does not provide either variety of escape – wish-

fulfilment or vicarious fear – for either characters or reader. As has been discussed,

Lolly Willowes initially seems like the ‘successful escape’, Gillian Beer identifies

(despite the shortfalls in Laura’s escape), adding that ‘[i]n her other novels of the late

Twenties and Thirties, escape is investigated rather than celebrated.’897

This, as I

have argued, is precisely what happens in Lolly Willowes also; escape is attempted

and explored, but ultimately not achieved – or, rather, a compromise is achieved

instead. This pattern is repeated time and again throughout domestic fantastic novels,

where, even when wish-fulfilment propels the fantastic moment (as it does in The

Love-Child and The Venetian Glass Nephew) it is not maintained. As has been seen,

almost every fantastic narrative concludes with the loss, failure, or corruption of the

supernatural element, and either a return to the troubling circumstances which invited

the fantastic, or an equally unsettled alternative. Clarissa disappears, Virginio leaves

Peter Innocent, Miss Hargreaves is destroyed. Silvia (in Lady Into Fox), Mr.

Mannering (in Green Thoughts), and Virginia (in Appius and Virginia) all die. G.K.

Chesterton writes in 1929 that it ‘is really remarkable’ that ‘in an age accused of

896

Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction p.18 897

Beer, 'Sylvia Townsend Warner: "The Centrifugal Kick"' p.77

279

frivolity […], the only popular sort of fantasy is the unhappy fantasy.’898

The

contribution of playfulness and whimsy to the tone of the middlebrow fantastic must

not be discounted, but tone and plot need not display equal amounts of Chesterton’s

‘happiness’, and playfulness does not necessarily equate with a successful escape.

(One of the few exceptions is Orlando, which grows steadily less fantastic as the

narrative progresses, and ends almost prosaically; the character has essentially

escaped from the fantastic as history progresses.899

)

Yet, having recognised the absence of wish-fulfilment, the reading of these novels

cannot be dismissed as the escapism of vicarious horror. The fantastic as a simple

source of horror was dated long before the First World War, at least outside lowbrow

penny-dreadfuls, and several theorists have dismissed fear as the primary effect of the

fantastic.900

The oral terror-tale of old offered an oddly unterrifying thrill when only

superstition could turn it into genuine unease, and Walter Scott’s 1827 claim that the

primary purpose of the fantastic was to instil ‘terror and veneration’901

was no longer

the case. Upheaval and worry replace horror (which is easily categorisable, and thus

rendered harmless), relying instead on rational anxieties, belief in which is not

superstitious but sane. Indeed, the language of fear is often described through the

language of movement or displacement. Fear is ‘unsettling’; victims of fear are

898

Chesterton, 'Magic and Fantasy in Fiction' p.162 899

Julia Briggs suggests that ‘Orlando’s fantasy attributes give place to Vita’s more familiar roles as

wife, mother and prize-winning poet’, while John Graham argues convincingly that balance moves

away from the fantastic, comparing the surreal frozen bumboat woman of the Great Frost with the un-

fantastic eighteenth-century prostitutes. [Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (London: Allen

Lane, 2005) p.206; John Graham, 'The "Caricature Value” of Parody and Fantasy in Orlando'

University of Toronto Quarterly, 30 (1961) 345-366, pp.359ff] Ironically, the unnamed house becomes

an increasingly fantastic concept, the more quotidian the surrounding plot and characters become.

While lavish Elizabethan Orlando befits the vast home, humbler 1920s Orlando’s occupancy underlines

the house’s almost mystical largeness. 900

See, for example, Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre p.35;

Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy p.9 901

Scott, 'On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and Particularly on the Works of Ernest

Theodore William Hoffman' p.63

280

‘disturbed’. Middlebrow fantastic novels domesticate these tropes of fear into actual

acts of unsettlement and displacement. Since these reflect the real dilemmas and

worries experienced by the period’s readers, there is never a sense of total

detachment, and the vicarious is replaced by the mimetic, however distorted that

reflection between reader and character might be.

Escape suggests not only movement from one thing to another (or from one place to

another), but a severing of connections. True escape brings with it the ability to cease

being affected by that which went before. This is demonstrably not the case within

domestic fantastic novels, and the same unfulfilled escape occurs for the reader; they

do not lose connection with either the rest of their reading or the rest of their lives.

Escape is inherently permanent, whereas the act of reading is necessarily temporary;

there is (of course) no such thing as the eternal book or the eternal reading process.

The real world is not left behind while reading, either diegetically or extradiegetically

(we are reminded, again, of the Provincial Lady reading in the maelstrom of the

everyday – ‘I pack frantically in the intervals of reading Vice Versa aloud’902

–

without compartmentalising the two activities.) When George Orwell writes about

escapist novels in ‘Good Bad Books’ (1945), he suggests that they

form pleasant patches in one’s memory, quiet corners where the mind can

browse at odd moments, but they hardly pretend to have anything to do with

real life.903

His choice of the word ‘corners’ (which Bachelard devotes a chapter to in The Poetics

of Space, as exemplifying ‘a symbol of solitude for the imagination’904

) has

associations both with domestic geography and the language of psychoanalysis, thus

902

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady in America' p.280 903

George Orwell, Critical Essays, ed. George Packer (London: Harvill Secker, 2009a) p.249 904

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space p.136

281

offering the conflicting ideas of cosiness and the repressed. Yet both comfort and

repression are necessarily linked to reality; corners must be joined to something.

Orwell’s image, ironically, shows how assuredly such novels do ‘have anything to do

with real life’. A corner exists in relation to the wider space; the genre-space of the

fantastic novel similarly is not detached from all other narratives, but exists in

relationship with them – and, more importantly, exists in relationship with reality. As

Rosemary Jackson writes, the fantastic ‘re-combines and inverts the real, but it does

not escape it: it exists in a parasitical or symbiotic relation to the real.’905

Similarly,

A.J. Apter argues, the fantastic ‘must be understood not as an escape from reality but

as an investigation of it.’906

Both theorists deny the primacy of ‘escape’ – and even

the notion of escape is, in fact, self-defeating, since ‘escape’ can only exist in relation

to the place of departure, which is thus never lost.

Isbel asks Judge in The Haunted Woman, when they are in the chimerical room, ‘“Tell

me – is this really a part of the house, or are we dreaming?”’907

The separate,

unusual, or peripheral area of the house is compared to the dream world, a similarly

nebulous entity, but also to the relationship between reality and an imaginary

narrative. The fantastic narrative relates to reality much as dreams relate to wakeful

experience – not in terms of wish-fulfilment, but structurally, as two interrelated

modes or structures of being. My thesis title refers to the ‘dark, mysterious, and

undocumented’;908

a quotation from Orlando which actually (in context) refers to his

protracted period of sleep, rather than the moment of gender metamorphosis.

Appropriately, ‘dark’ can be applied to fantastic novels not as a marker of terror or the

905

Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion p.20 906

Apter, Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality p.2 907

Lindsay, The Haunted Woman p.84 908

Woolf, Orlando p.63

282

macabre, but in the sense which corresponds to sleep; a lack of awareness or agency,

and immersion in the inexplicable and strange. Instances of sleeping recur in these

novels, as processes of transformation. Laura Willowes sleeps ‘for days and days’909

after arriving in Great Mop, shortly before changing her attitude towards the

countryside (by abandoning her map); Clarissa initially comes back to Agatha in a

dream and (as Agatha describes it to herself) ‘she woke me up’;910

as Flower

Phantoms opens Judy is in ‘a condition beautifully comatose, a state resembling

sleep’ during which ‘she seemed once or twice about to fall into some unfamiliar

night.’911

Sleep is not an escape from reality, but a parallel and temporary version of

it. In the same way, the reading of a domestic fantastic novel is not an abandonment

of reality, but a parallel immersion in a space contiguous to it. Even if the

unconsciousness of sleeping is discounted, and daydreaming is considered instead, a

useful parallel is offered. Bachelard suggests the ‘chief benefit of the house’ is that it

‘shelters daydreaming’912

– which, in the interwar period, was a fraught state, often

seen as a wasteful indulgence. T.S. Eliot called it ‘a disease of society’,913

while the

Provincial Lady anxiously refers to an article about daydreaming in Time and Tide,

which (though she does not give its title) is ‘Day-Dreamers All’ by L.A.G. Strong.

Strong attributes this ‘imagined self-fulfilment’ to ‘an extension of the childish

faculty of story-telling, harmless as long as it remains irrelevant to life itself.’914

An

alternative space for daydreaming (for the creation of the fantastic; for ‘story-telling’)

epitomises the relationship between the fantastic and reality, precisely because it

cannot ‘remain irrelevant to life itself’. Rather than an extraneous indulgence, it is a

909

Warner, Lolly Willowes p.113 910

Olivier, The Love-Child p.15 911

Fraser, Flower Phantoms p.10 912

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space p.6 913

T.S. Eliot, 'A Commentary' The Criterion, July (1932) 676-683, p.679 914

Delafield, 'The Provincial Lady Goes Further' p.251; L.A.G. Strong, 'Day-Dreamers All' Time and

Tide, 09/07/32 (1932) 764-765

283

commentary. As Jackson and Apter observe, reality is intentionally retained, to be

manipulated, turned around, and examined – kept at a distance, but kept on a tether.

The fantastic as investigation

This relationship with reality (for the author) is manipulative, but need not be

subversive. Rosemary Jackson is primarily concerned with the fantastic as an act of

subversion: ‘on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that

which is outside dominant value systems.’915

She writes that the fantastic is not

inherently transgressive, but acts as such in its cultural context.916

I believe that the

opposite is true. The fantastic is, by definition, inherently subversive on an internal,

thematic level (in the basic sense that it ‘subverts’ – that is, changes – reality) but not

necessarily on an ideological or contextualised level. Similarly, W.R. Irwin describes

‘a conspiracy of intellectual subversiveness’917

between writer and reader, referring to

the way in which the fantastic alters the silently acknowledged narrative rules

between these parties, rather than an ideological subversion. Once it is presumed that

the fantastic is consistently subversive in accordance with any single ideological

agenda (either Jackson’s left-wing agenda, or any other), then ‘subversion’ becomes

impracticable as a term upon which to pin the whole subgenre, either in theory or in

practice.

Instead, the space of the fantastic permits distortion primarily for the act of

investigation – both for the author (introducing topics which might otherwise be too

painful, awkward, inappropriate, or even too dull, to approach, but in a disguise which

915

Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion p.4 916

Ibid. p.175 917

Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy p.9

284

is not too heavy for discernment)918

and for the self-analytical reader. The narrative

need not necessarily be either tragic or whimsical, but instead investigative. This may

sound simply like a repetition of the definition of the fantastic – that it takes place in a

recognisable world – but the spatiality of this image is more complex. The fantastic

narrative does not only occur in the ‘real world’, it exists alongside it, interweaves

with it, and both reflects and changes it. The fantastic exists in a fourth dimension, as

it were, neither separable from the real nor condensable with it. This is one of the

reasons that (as Irwin notes)919

there are so seldom subplots in fantastic narratives.

This multiplicity requires a single momentum and single focus, because any entirely

non-fantastic subplot within the novel would disrupt the linearity of the plot and its

attachment to a particular social grievance.

Whether addressing the concerns of childlessness, sexuality, independent space, or

any other matter, the fantastic enables (in the reader) a division of self, in the same

way that Agatha and Clarissa in The Love-Child are constructed from a single

selfhood. Alongside this division of self is the ability to see self/reality at a distance,

becoming both observer and observed. The relationship between Agatha and

Clarissa, again, exemplifies this: ‘Clarissa loved these wide spaces; she sat silent,

staring. Agatha just watched her, she wanted no more distant horizon.’920

As a

fantastic creation, Clarissa’s worldview is boundless; as the creator, Agatha has

determined limits to the world she wishes to see. This could be seen as a model of

918

Elinor Wylie quotes the novelist and humorist Christopher Morley, adding ‘this is excellent and

exact’, when he writes that the ‘recourse of those who feel that they have something to say, but desire

to avoid the bitterness of being understood, has been (ever since Aesop) the fable or fantasy.’ It would

be truer to say that the author wishes to avoid the ‘bitterness of being straightforward’, for the fantastic

– and, moreso, fable – must always ultimately be discernable and interpretable, otherwise it is simply

surrealist or absurd. [Quoted in Hively, A Private Madness: The Genius of Elinor Wylie p.145] 919

Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy pp.72f 920

Olivier, The Love-Child p.129

285

author and reader (Agatha, the author figure, imposes a precisely-calculated diegetic

framework to the infinitude the reader/Clarissa is willing to see) but it also illustrates

the relationship between the fantastic and the real, where the reader is both Agatha

and Clarissa – looking into unknown expanses, but also examining this act of

observation. Everyday life can be analysed at the same time as it is experienced.

The space of the fantastic is thus from the same mould as the ‘asides’ which recur in

the Provincial Lady diaries, where she takes a step back from everyday life to make a

parenthesised ‘Query’. These narratives are set in the everyday, but still engage with

and interrogate it. It is comprehension, rather than liberation, which is seen the

keynote of the domestic fantastic. The alternative space of the fantastic is not a

dreamscape of idealism, but often a process of self-analysis and self-development;

Laura Willowes (as the exemplar of partial escape) does not achieve unalloyed

freedom, but understands better which select freedoms she most prizes. The fantastic,

as Anna Koenen argues, is ‘a mode used to articulate a desire for control’.921

In a

sense it offers this control, by resisting the pretence that the middlebrow home is

stable while also controlling the images of instability. The fantastic is thus a way of

imposing order on disorder – or, at least, introducing a partially ordered disorder – in

the same way that Briganti and Mezei identify ‘in fiction and everyday life, the house

itself is material evidence of the human endeavor to control nature and the physical

environment’.922

But it is ‘endeavor’ rather than success which is made palpable.

Apter correctly notes that the fantastic ‘is not a means of consolation and recovery but

921

Koenen, Visions of Doom, Plots of Power: The Fantastic in Anglo-American Women's Literature

p.3. Koenen is writing particularly about women’s fiction. I would suggest, although much of my

thesis has concerned issues primarily effecting women, that this articulation of a desire for control

could equally apply to male writers, characters, and readers – as it does, say, in Miss Hargreaves. 922

Briganti and Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E.H. Young p.19

286

of registering losses and fears’.923

This explains why domestic fantastic novels

portray unsuccessful escapes and unfulfilled desires, including the hubris which

denies the availability of a panacea, even in a fantastic world. Offering a complete

and triumphant change in a novel would undermine the need for change in society,

and Laura’s flawed transformation, Peter Innocent’s loneliness, Agatha’s apparent

insanity, and so forth, demonstrate the middlebrow fantastic novel’s refusal to turn a

blind eye to the undercurrent of reality enduring both for characters and readers.

Although Irwin recognises that works do not qualify as fantastic if they ‘promote

reverie, not intellectual play’, he ultimately (and, I believe, wrongly) surmises that

‘[n]othing is immune from fantasy, but nothing of any conceptual validity is

destroyed or overturned by it.’924

The reason he gives for this conclusion is that the

propositions against which a fantasist makes counterdemonstration are not

stereotypes of limited duration […], but rather general truths and conventions of

understanding reality so widely accepted as to be suprahistorical.925

The example he gives is that a lady turning into a fox will always be fantastic,

regardless of the period in which Lady Into Fox is set, or when it was published.

Irwin, however, is conflating conceit and catalyst. The manifestation of the fantastic

may be ‘suprahistorical’ (this, indeed, is one of the aspects which distinguishes

fantastic fiction from science fiction) but the extradiegetic reasons for the author

writing the work, and the audience reading it, can be of limited duration. As these

change, so the varieties of narrative responses change. Without the shifting status of

female sexuality in the 1920s, Lady Into Fox might not have been written in the way it

was.

923

Apter, Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality p.6 924

Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy p.9; p.183 925

Ibid. p.189

287

After the Second World War

Discussing the ‘interwar period’ is not simply a convenient shorthand for the middle

of the twentieth century; the World Wars did, of course, begin and end a great number

of discourses. The popularity of the domestic fantastic did, indeed, pall by the end of

the 1930s, and this was partly due to the Second World War. The magnitude of

conflict, and the many disquietudes which came in its wake, did turn attention away

from a large number of the anxieties which had preoccupied middlebrow writers and

the middlebrow public in the 1920s and 1930s, catalysed narratives, and been codified

in metamorphosis, creation, or other manifestations of the fantastic. Although issues

of unmarried women, childlessness, and female sexuality were not, of course, entirely

and suddenly resolved in 1939 (or 1945), they no longer transfixed the nation in the

same way, and the gradual discomfort of these concerns was replaced by the sudden

shocks of bomb damage, domestic displacement, and fatalities. Similarly, the vogue

for Freudianism which had helped create intellectual space for the fantastic had died

down by the late 1940s – perhaps owing as much to familiarity breeding contempt as

to the war; Leonora Eyles writes in 1947 that ‘ill-instructed folk […] seized on this

mode of psychology in the nineteen-twenties, when we were all psychologically

astray after our first taste of world war’, adding ‘I am sure it was unwise for so many

uninstructed young people like myself in the early nineteen-twenties to gobble Freud

hook, line and sinker as we did, and not digest him very well’.926

Once more, the

somatic qualities of reading are introduced, in this case suggesting that a form of

literary indigestion had prompted experimentation with various comprehensions of

reality, and that one of the side-effects of war was a medication to cure this.

926

Eyles, Unmarried But Happy p.90; p.93

288

But if it were only dwindling fascination with various societal ills which had changed,

then others would have replaced them as focal points for fantastic exploration. Irwin

suggests that there have been few fantastic novels since ‘about 1957’ because that

year was an approximate inauguration of an ‘age of panic’, rather than the ‘Age of

Anxiety’ described by Auden, and that readers require something more urgent and

immediate than the codifications of the fantastic.927

Although Auden’s poem was

published more than two decades after the peak of the interest in fantastic fiction,

Irwin is (of course) correct in identifying the correlation between anxieties and

recourse to the fantastic. However, the diminishing number of domestic fantastic

novels is due less to this evolving ‘spirit of the age’, I would argue, than the

developing use of the fantastic in the twentieth-century novel.

This development is essentially an extension of that alternative space which readers

sought and authors created. This alternative space was initially carved as a subsection

of the middlebrow novel, both in terms of an author’s output (their fantastic novel[s]

appearing alongside their domestic novels in the marketplace) and the ways in which

domestic fantastic novels were advertised and read. Increasingly, this space was

professionalised and specialised. Steven Fischer writes that:

subgenres that had first emerged in the nineteenth century, such as the criminal

or science-fiction novel, ramified in the second half of the twentieth: the history

crimi, the gothic crimi, the sport crimi; or the space-travel sci-fi, the time-travel

sci-fi, and now the computer sci-fi.928

Fischer’s examples can, of course, be extended to fantastic and Fantasy novels. It

became increasingly impossible to write a novel with fantastic elements which was

927

Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy p.184 928

Fischer, A History of Reading p.301

289

not immediately and conclusively categorised by publisher, bookshop, and public.

The space of the bookshop became organised by genre, and a literary facet which in

the 1920s could be added to develop or enhance a narrative served instead, in the

post-war (or, perhaps more accurately, the post-Tolkien) era, to ghettoize it.

Tolkien’s success certainly left a legacy for Fantasy novels, rather than the fantastic,

but these lines were increasingly blurred. Rather than the fantastic being seen as

occupying a space on the peripheries of the domestic novel, it transferred (in the

minds of most publishers and readers) to occupying similar peripheries of the Fantasy

novel.

Although there remain, unsurprisingly, some post-war novels which use the fantastic

without becoming Fantasy narratives, these often include the fantastic as an incidental

impulse or element, rather than permitting it to be the pivot of the novel or the

dominant focus of the character’s development. As an example, both Barbara

Comyns’ The Vet’s Daughter (1959) and Barbara Trapido’s Juggling (1994)

incorporate scenes where characters supernaturally levitate, but these moments are

treated as ‘extras’, augmenting the narrative rather than crystallising it. Writers who

turn to the surreal (such as Muriel Spark, in the creation of Dougal Douglas and

elsewhere) once more have treated these facets as subplots or impulses with a

supporting role, rather than the unitary focus shown in the interwar domestic fantastic

novel.

More work can (and should) be done on the post-war British middlebrow, and

middlebrow literature of the 21st century which has to some extent – in an age with

near-universal literacy and, yet, a decline in the celebration of literary intelligentsia

290

and melees like the Bloomsbury Group – subsumed both the lowbrow and the

highbrow, particularly as regards novels. As Stan Persky writes, that which he labels

the ‘serious novel’ has, in the 21st century, ‘a reduced status in cultural conversation, a

more ambiguous role in intellectual life, and a diminished readership.’929

There is no

longer the pervasive sense of defining the middlebrow through an anti-criteria or in

relation to a dominant avant-garde; the avant-garde is now more likely to be defined

in relation to the mainstream (and even the Booker Prize, purportedly finding the best

novel in any given year, has been declared ‘resolutely middlebrow’).930

Characteristics which aided a definition of a middlebrow readership persist, in

evolving ways. The Book Society has its equivalent in the Richard and Judy Book

Club, or (in America) the Oprah Book Club; mass, anonymous reading still takes

place, and the importance of identification amongst this number is still present. The

middlebrow joy of playing with literary antecedents has probably never been more

popular, although more institutionalised than within the pages of the Provincial Lady

diaries, with examples ranging from Pride and Prejudice reinterpreted as YouTube

video blogging in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries to the Dickens World theme park in

Kent. The intangible middlebrow communities set up in the form of the Book Society

and the assumed readership of novels like Delafield’s were, in principle, the precursor

to the online community. But, while these characteristics of the middlebrow endure

into the present day, the fashion for the domestic fantastic – once described as the

‘new tendency in the novel’, and ‘the mode of the moment’931

– was short-lived, and

929

Stan Persky, Reading the 21st Century: Books of the Decade 2000-2009 (London; Montreal &

Kingston, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011 repr.2012) p.11 930

Andrew Gallix, 'The Booker Steps Away From Being Its Own Genre', Guardian

<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/28/booker-prize-longlist>, accessed 20

September 2013 931

Wolfe, 'The Growth of Fantasy in the Novel' p.45; R.C.W., ‘In the Mode of the Moment’ Daily

Herald (21/04/26) Chatto & Windus Archive CW C/34 (Press Cuttings vol.31, 1926), University of

Reading

291

could only exist at one stage of the development of fantastic literature. During that

interwar time, when assessments of British society were being widely recalibrated, it

was a subgenre which produced a select but significant range of novels which

(whether playful or poignant, hopeful or tragic, nostalgic or progressive) provided the

means for both author and reader to interrogate and comment upon the most

pervading middle-class social anxieties of the period, in unusual and revitalising

ways.

292

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